"This is some deeply weird liberal saviour racism. All the agency in this representation is on the side of the intervening white person, while the Muslim woman is quiet, meek and passively grateful. The intervention doesn't challenge the racist politics of the abuser. Instead you're supposed to "ignore the attacker" and *talk about the weather*. The intervening white person doesn't allow that the Muslim woman might herself have something to say about the racism being directed at her. The whole strategy of "building the safe space" depends on her being quiet. And through these means, the racist attacker is supposed to give up and go away, fuming in "irrelevance". What if he doesn't? What if he keeps it up? What if he escalates? What if you end up having to shout at the top of your lungs about the weather because now he's screaming about sending them back? 

How useless is your solidarity then? Where is your safe space? And even if he does give up, in what sense is he irrelevant? He has just felt confident enough to embark on a racist attack, and his target knows that there are more people like him out there, and that many onlookers agree with him, and that she is regarded as an antinational menace by large numbers of people. And the best ally she has is some weak-assed liberal bullshit that tries to laugh it off and chatter about the fucking weather. It might, in some circumstances, be sensible to de-escalate and avoid confrontation. But to elevate this to a tactical principle is a form of verbal gentrification, smothering the nasty and necessarily politicised underside of daily life behind a facade of good manners, and leaving only the racist feeling more empowered as a result." 

— Richard Seymour