Word: sasc
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Damon Silvers' "Divestiture A History" is an example of the kind of politics that decimated the South Africa Solidarity committee in 1979 and 1980. In one essay, Silvers has managed to gut the essentials of what SASC stood for from...
...course, SASC did maintain that peaceful measures would speed up liberation and save lives, but it never tried to "persuade white South Africa". Nor would SASC of 1982 or even 1983 have expected "white society to give up trying to maintain a doomed social order." SASC efforts were aimed at weakening the apartheid state, not getting white South Africa to listen...
Silvers is promoting a very frustrating kind of politics which advocates reasoning with a genocidal and intransigent ruling class. It is therefore not surprising that he calls the Sullivan Principles, "a series of basic humane guidelines." This is perhaps the clearest abandonment of old SASC's basic line. The Sullivan Principles call "for desegregated bathrooms and training programs for token black executives" to quote an old SASC leaflet. In fact, they provide for a total of 96 managers and managers in training in South Africa. Yet, Silvers thinks pure white domination under the Sullivan Principles to be "humane." He does...
...fact, Silvers accepts without criticism the possibility "that corporations behave progressively" just as Derek Bok does. He does not explain what used to be the SASC belief that it is impossible for a corporation to operate progressively under apartheid laws that call for confiscation of American assets in time of civil war, which according to apartheid generals is already underway and not something of the "horrible" future: Silvers even implies that Harvard now takes ethics into consideration in its investments and say that pre-1972 policies were neutral or "amoral." Some former members of SASC and other anti-apartheid activists...
...aftermath of the murder of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko by South Africa security police and the Soweto riots that followed when the South African police killed hundreds of Black students, the divestiture movement at Harvard was revived with the founding of the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC). The Harvard Corporation and the ACSR at this time recognized no special problems with corporations doing business in South Africa, but after a year of rallies, pickets and packed ACSR hearings, culminating in a 3000- (yes, that's three thousand) person torchlight parade and day-long blockade of University Hall...