It is to criminalise the [racist] act while leaving entirely untouched the political and social machinery that produces the actor.
What the Islamophobia framing does not fully name in regard to these attacks — structurally, systemically, politically — is the broader racial syntax that makes brown and Black bodies targets regardless of their faith. That this predates the specific targeting of Muslims in post-9/11 discourse and was in fact in operation when brown and Black communities were policed under Sus laws in the 1980s and 1990s. So when a shirtless man in Edinburgh reads a non-white face and violently attacks and acts on what he believes it represents, it is indeed this invisible racial syntax that underpins his actions and the structural, systemic and political response to his actions. Thus the category “Islamophobia,” applied exclusively, does three things simultaneously: it names a real harm, it disciplines that harm into a manageable container, and it permits the broader racial structure to remain not only intact but unexamined.
The insistence on naming Edinburgh solely through the language of Islamophobia ultimately tells us as much about Britain’s preferred explanations of racism as it does about the attack itself. Islamophobia is real, deadly and deserving of serious scrutiny, but when it becomes the final frame rather than the starting point, it obscures the wider racial logic through which brown and Black bodies are rendered visible as threats, foreigners and intruders regardless of their actual faith, citizenship or history.
What happened in Edinburgh was not simply the expression of hostility towards a religion; it was the enactment of a racial imagination shaped by empire, nationalism and exclusion, one that collapses difference into sameness and reads certain bodies as permanently out of place. The question, then, is not only why Muslims continue to be targeted, but why brown and Black bodies are sought out as targets in the first place. Until our analysis moves beyond the management of individual prejudices and confronts the deeper structures that organise belonging and exclusion, we risk mistaking the symptom for the system—debating the identity of the victims while leaving untouched the insidious, deadly, racial grammar and the systems, structures and politics that continue to produce them.