  We point out that a non-relativistic $\sim 2 $ GeV dark matter (DM) which
interacts with visible matter through higher dimensional Rayleigh operators
could explain the excess of "electron recoil" events recently observed by the
Xenon1T collaboration. A DM scattering event results in a few keV photon that
on average carries most of the deposited energy, while the nuclear recoil
energy is only a subleading correction. Since the Xenon1T detector does not
discriminate between electrons and photons, such events would be interpreted as
excess of the keV electrons. Indirect constraints from dark matter annihilation
are avoided for light mediators of ${\mathcal O}(10~{\rm MeV})$ that have
sizable couplings to neutrinos. One loop induced spin-independent scattering in
dark matter may soon lead to a confirmation signal or already excludes regions
of viable parameter space for the Rayleigh DM model, depending on what the
exact values of the unknown nonperturbative nuclear matrix elements are.
