Wrong Answer to Outrage

Apartheid denies blacks in South Africa the most basic elements of human dignity: the right to live where one wants, work where one can, learn what one must. All are violated massively every day. Apartheid is a system of minority rule that treats the majority with contempt and now often fear. It must be broken down. But that urgent goal cannot be accomplished by pulling out American investment in South Africa, as urged by both Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and strong, earnest voices on University of California campuses.

Bradley called Tuesday for divesting stock that the city’s pension funds hold in firms that do business in South Africa, starting with those that sell military equipment to its government. About 20% of the city’s nearly $4 billion in pension funds would be affected. In addition, the mayor asked that all city deposits be removed from banks and institutions that lend money to South Africa; the city usually has about $1.5 billion in daily deposits. The UC Board of Regents is being urged by protesting students and by some legislators to sell $1.7 billion of stock in companies with South African ties.

The American public’s outrage leads to reaching for the wrong answer for the right reasons of concern and compassion. As matters stand now, it is the wrong answer because it can affect the very black workers who have a handhold on a better life, it removes the very real leverage for change that investors now exert in South Africa’s precarious economy, and it may be an irresponsible exercise of officials’ duty to invest pension funds in the soundest way.

There is still hope for results from efforts of 119 U.S. corporations that agreed in January to take a tougher stance in South Africa, including demanding an end to apartheid. These companies agreed to expand the Sullivan Principles that outline corporate responsibilities for ending the ruthless effects of apartheid. The principles are named after their originator, the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan of Philadelphia. U.S. companies employ only about 66,000 of South Africa’s 6 million workers, but the firms are a major force because of their advanced technology and economic strength. They are training black workers, promoting them to supervisory positions, paying them equally with whites, and helping establish better schools, housing and health care. When the money leaves South Africa, so does the leverage for change.

Vernon Jordan, former head of the National Urban League, has wrestled long and hard with the question of divestment. He remembers five young South Africans who took a highly technical training course from Xerox. Jordan handed them their graduation certificates in 1976. “That made a lasting impression,” Jordan says today. “I don’t know why I have the right to deny them a place to work because of my moral needs.”

There may come a time when working within the system is no longer possible. That time came often in the American civil-rights movement when protest from people who left organizations that discriminated was more effective than from those who stayed. The situation today is not analogous. Those being urged to roll up their sleeves to fight for change have the money and thus the influence to help force it along. Removing that influence could rob the black South Africans who so moved Vernon Jordan of their most potent allies.