Watching the painful interview of Faiza Shaheen on Newsnight on Wednesday after her deselection from the Labour party, I was reminded of the wise words of Toni Morrison: “The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being … None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
And there always is. The past week of Labour’s election campaign has become a very ugly distraction of blatant anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. Racism more often than not becomes a spectacle for those with no skin in the game, and that is exactly what the humiliation heaped on Shaheen – a young, working-class Muslim woman – has become.
