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Black Lives Matter protesters in London, UK – June, 2020. Photo: Joao Daniel Pereira / Shutterstock.com
Since mid-March, Adam Habib, the new director of SOAS, University of London, has been on leave while under investigation “in the context of anti-Blackness as a structural issue in SOAS.” SOAS launched the investigation after Habib, a South African man of Indian descent, casually used an anti-Black racial slur during a student meeting in response to a question about accountability for SOAS professors who use the term in class.
After being criticized for his own repetition of the term, Habib doubled down, citing his identity as an African man and invoking his history as a former anti-Apartheid activist in South Africa. Yet Habib’s response belies his checkered past of weaponizing identity politics for repressive means. During his tenure as the Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, he frequently invoked his status as an ant