I was heartbroken when I heard about the devastating attacks in Southport. My distress was shared by people up and down the country. But only people of colour will be familiar with the anxiety that such a heinous crime brings. Our grief and worry is tinged with the fear that if the perpetrator is a person of colour, a torrent of media coverage will follow that identifies some broader community significance and culpability.

Predictably, plainly false accounts of the perpetrator being Muslim and having arrived in the UK via a ‘small boat’ triggered an angry and ongoing rash of violence against Muslim communities, people seeking asylum and communities of colour. Ongoing linkage to the crime has given a cover to the violence and enabled mainstream media to continue to label the racist rioting as ‘protests’ and ‘anti-immigrant demonstrations’ despite repeated warnings about the use of that legitimising language.

Language and framing matters, and it is the language of hate that has saturated our politics for years, intensified in recent months, which has created the fertile ground for violence of this scale and ferocity. We have watched hideous racist violence inflicted on people snatched out of their cars, attacked on streets and in parks, mosques surrounded by people shouting ‘death to Muslims’, Muslim cemeteries desecrated, arson attacks with people — families — cowering inside burning buildings, businesses ransacked and destroyed, walls daubed with ‘P***’.

The slogans chanted by rioters, including ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘We want our country back’, are borrowed directly from slogans that have been crafted by our political leaders. Yes, social media and messaging services have spread disinformation and been deliberately provocative; actors like Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk have functioned as agent provocateurs, but it is a mistake to zoom into this pernicious activity at the fringes and miss what is directly in front of us. The fists and fury may be supported by online social media, but the socialisation of racism has been activated and driven by mainstream media and politicians.

The agenda-setting role of the media has never been more clear. Even whilst communities brace themselves against more expected violence, mainstream media commentary has moved onto gaslighting communities of colour, discussing the ‘legitimate grievances’ that need to be distilled from the rampaging violence. Media pundits are rolling over to agendas set by the likes of Nigel Farage, who wants to talk about levels of ‘integration’ and migrant numbers. This is the most hideous and insulting form of victim-blaming. How can it be permissible to discuss Muslim community integration when Muslims are being subjected to ongoing violent and sustained attack?

As a Muslim woman, my vulnerability is not calculated by a measurement of my level of integration; it is because I am Muslim, and it is because my community has been actively demonised for decades. Many of the areas where the violence started are not communities with a great number of migrants, but rather predominantly white communities. The anger that has been directed towards Muslims, migrants and people of colour cannot be debated into legitimacy. The attempt to do so is itself another layer of complicity and racism.

The debate about two tier policing is yet another example of framing that is a gross misrepresentation. The momentum for the discussion is licensed by mainstream media, which accept this as a legitimate national conversation piece, despite there being little basis for its prominence. The idea that policing has ever favoured communities of colour is an objective absurdity given everything we know about the disproportionality of the use of force against them. Comparing the policing response to arson attacks on libraries and hotels, rampages of riotous violence against random innocent people and the desecration of graves to the policing of largely peaceful BLM and pro-Palestine marches is incredulous and should be shut down, and yet instead, that framing is given life and energy. If anything, there should be a question mark about why charges thus far have been for violent disorder rather than the more serious riot charges which have been used against Kill the Bill protestors in 2021.

Today there are communities gathering to oppose any efforts of racist rioters to attack their spaces. Hyper-attention to a few incidents of aggressive retaliation feels unreasonable considering the largely peaceful response thus far. It is interesting to note that many political leaders are calling for people to stay at home and let the police manage the problem. But history shows us that we are never going to police our way out of a problem of racism. In fact, the call shows little sensitivity to the feelings of many communities of colour who feel under threat and attack and value communities mobilising support.

There is a mode of hypervigilance that all people of colour have switched to, one where we examine our visibility in spaces that might previously have felt safe. Whether it is the commute to work, a grocery trip or letting our children go out to play during their summer holiday, we are all making multiple risk assessments for ourselves and those we love. It is not just the direct physical threat that looms in our thinking but the added suspicion that has seeped into our routine interactions. We are each trying to figure out what our friends and neighbours might be thinking, the sympathies or grievances they might nurture, or the outright hostility that we might encounter. Acts of community solidarity that are multi-racial and across classes are in this context, urgent and necessary. People should be able to gather peacefully and responsibly to show their solidarity against far-right racist rioters, and we need to reject the temptation to frame these gatherings as co-equal disrupters; they are essential to healing the wounds that have been inflicted.

When the racist violence recedes, there are questions we should be asking about the levels of economic harm that successive governments have exposed working-class communities to. But we must oppose that being a question of a ‘left behind white working class’ directed into racialised grievances. Communities need to be rebuilt, but that can only happen if we can switch off the toxic mood music that would have us hate each other rather than call out the hateful politics that has neglected and poisoned our communities.