Weeks on from the riots, as communities of colour across the country recover, there is an emerging ‘community cohesion’ agenda which is being posed as the panacea to the problems the riots exposed. This must be challenged. Romanticising the power of ‘community moments’ to provide a social glue to the damage of racism and austerity is simply untenable.

Over the summer, we witnessed racist riots of the scale and ferocity not seen in a generation. Like many people of colour in this country, I was shocked not solely by the violence that we witnessed but also by how little was done by media and political elites to interrogate the racism embedded in the violence and centre its victims. Coverage described rioters as ‘protestors’, spoke of their ‘legitimate grievances’ and entertained dubious allegations of ‘two-tier policing’. The political response focused on law and order and the deployment of policing and criminal justice resources for what was persistently described as ‘thuggery’, conveniently sidestepping the aiding and abetting role the entire political class has relentlessly performed these past years, particularly in relation to migration policy and Islamophobia.

Now, as the dust settles, even more worrying is the retreat into uncritical conversations about ‘community cohesion’ which fail to take account of the disputed efficacy of these approaches. Earlier this week, the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government announced a new £15 million community recovery fund, to empower communities to address the deeper roots of the unrest, and a new report set out a manifesto for the ‘community cohesion’ agenda as a sole solution to the racist violence.

However, there is considerable research that indicates that relying on simplistic community cohesion frameworks risks focusing on explanations that identify a lack of ‘integration’ amongst different communities as the cause of riotous violence, diminishing the role of racism and austerity. It was racism that meant that it was Muslims specifically and people of colour who were targeted by the organised onslaught of violence. Years of demonising policies towards migrants and people seeking asylum and the increasing normalisation of islamophobia in our mainstream political and media conversation have encouraged and emboldened a fear and hatred of various communities of colour.  The rise of the far right is neither inevitable nor natural but something that mainstream politicians and media have actively enabled.

Community cohesion models tend to focus on small-scale, localised interventions that downplay the devastating role that austerity has had on communities and households. Austerity has stripped away the social infrastructures of communities and robbed them of core public services that enable them to live convivial local lives. Initiatives that seek to facilitate contact between different groups cannot be serious if they are trying to knit together the bare bones of communities that have been decimated by decades of politically imposed poverty.

But it is important to recognise that explanations focusing on deprivation in communities alone, or as a priority, will also fail because they make the mistake of forgetting that it is communities of colour that have faced the disproportionate brunt of austerity over the last 14 years. But it certainly wasn’t them out rioting against their neighbours or burning down hotels with people inside them. Deprivation explanations alone cannot explain the levels of racism that people of colour in this country experience and were ultimately laid bare this summer.

We know that the slogans chanted by rioters, including ‘Stop the boats’ and ‘We want our country back’ were directly related to national policy agendas and soundbites that have been crafted by our national political leaders. Just last month, as part of the UN’s analysis of the state of race and racism in the UK, a report highlighted the ‘direct connection between the actions of public figures and racial discrimination’, advocating for immediate action to be taken to prevent this. To imagine that ‘increased social contact’ can overcome the very powerful and dominant national messaging that it is migrants, Muslims and people seeking asylum who are the main source of grievance, threat and economic depreciation, simply lacks credibility. It also fundamentally fails to acknowledge the fact that national policies and mainstream media have spent decades poisoning the terms by which local communities can relate to one another.

To actually address the horrific violence we saw this summer, and prevent inevitable future instances, the government must put in place a long-term, cross-departmental anti-racist strategy that identifies and addresses deep-seated structural racism across every aspect of British society. It must invest in communities and provide the resources and infrastructures that enable them to thrive and prosper.

And, crucially, the government and mainstream media must change tact from the racist scapegoating of Muslims, migrants and people seeking asylum — creating the conditions that enable disinformation and racism. Without a wholesale shift in our political culture, language and policies, further and more serious outbreaks of violence and hatred are inevitable.

Communities are no doubt at the heart of repairing the damage of this summer’s violence, but the problem of racism did not start, nor will it end, there.