Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University, and President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association.

Racist denial is integral to the repackaging of racism under the terms of postracialism, Whereby matters racial, at a time when racism is almost universally understood as wrong, are presented as "not racist."

The familiar proviso, "I am not racist, but ..." is no longer even necessary at a time when it has become easy to rationalize the denial of justice to racialized groups as commonsense, rather than discriminatory.

Racial logic, as David Goldberg argues, has always been based on rationality. Race is a system of meaning that justifies the denial of full humanity to groups classed as inferior or less deserving than white Europeans. Thus, far from being the irrational attitude that race-thinking is widely understood to be, it is in fact rational if we understand it to underpin the colonial expansionist project, slavery and the demarcation of Europe from non-Europe.

There has never been much effort made to explain this in the mainstream. In our history lessons, we don't learn about the colonial past as a system of racial domination that bedrocks modern capitalism and the birth of the nation state.

Even at universities, I often find there is a simplistic grasp of anything beyond racism as discrimination and exclusion, resolvable through better policy-making and/or education. Racism as a framework through which to contend with the structural endowments of race as a system of power tells only a partial story.

It is easier to mobilize opposition to racism if we understand it to be a set of bad attitudes, perhaps birthing unfair policies and structures, that anyone is capable of. It is harder to accept that race is a one-way system whose very existence serves the maintenance of white supremacy and that all white people - even those who abhor racism - are the beneficiaries, particularly if we live, as is the case for all non-Aboriginal people living in Australia, on unceded territory belonging to the First Nations.

It is thus easy to dismiss contemporary discussions of the relation of Australian state and society to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as an ongoing colonial one and to dwell in the safer territory of racism as bad faith. Seeing racism as a moral failing allows us much more easily to deny that we are complicit.

This partial retelling of the history of race seems to be me to be at the heart of the Australian government's rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, "race has been central to Australian politics and the transition from colony to nation," and yet this is rarely taken into account. Indeed, she points out, John Howard, who, as Prime Minister, rejected the notion that present-day Australians have any responsibility for the past injustices meted out to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was on record as being strongly opposed to ethnic or racial discrimination. In other words, the denial of the significance of race is not inconsistent with the stated opposition to discrimination.

The failure to truly reckon with the persistent legacies of race explains the congruence between Howard's two positions, which he was not alone in espousing and indeed form majority opinion among white Australians. Racism understood as inequality and discrimination universalizes it into a position that anyone can hold, thus distancing it from the structural conditions of race.

Hence, Malcolm Turnbull's rejection of the idea of a Makarrata Commission "to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and Nations and truth-telling about our history," proposed at Uluru, is entirely consistent with the mainstream belief that racism is the denial of liberal equality by anyone to anyone. In language reminiscent of the bans on affirmative action in public universities in several American states, the Prime Minister rejected the proposal on the basis that the Commission would be anti-egalitarian and undemocratic because it would exclusively represent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

While it is heartening to note the number of people, including from my academic community, who have come out in support of the Statement and against the government's position, there is still a lot of work to be done in parsing the implications of the rejection. There are two points worth making.

First, the side-lining of race in favour of racism as ideology and attitude are foundational to the presentation of racism as inequality that undergirds the rejection of a Makarrata Commission. Lisa Lowe, in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents analyses why this is the case. Far from being the panacea to racial injustice, the spread of liberal ideology served to cement the hierarchical division between Europe and non-Europe signified by race. Lowe, through a revisiting of the archives and key literary and autobiographical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shows us how, under modern liberalism, the hierarchies on which the maintenance of the systems of colonialism and slavery depend are rewritten as a story about the necessity of European rule without which the "differentiated peoples across the globe" could not survive. European rule is thus established as "good" for the progress of civilization as a whole. This ethos - which, in Australia, was expressed under the euphemism of "protection" - rationalizes the institutions of colonial government, from the slave codes to the vagrancy laws instituted by the British in Hong Kong.

The liberal tradition, far from being an anathema to a racial worldview, was in fact intrinsic to the entrenchment of Western domination over the majority of the world's people. Central to the interrelatedness of race and liberalism, paradoxically, is the fiction that they are conceptually opposed. This fictional opposition obscures the racial framing of arguments around "freedom of speech," for example. Because free speech is held up as the ultimate adjudicator of individual freedom, the fact that its most vocal proponents are mainly concerned with people's right "to be bigots" is downplayed.

The rejection of the Makarrata Commission as a body of Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people is also based on the knowledge that such a body would have the right to make decisions about who can speak for and/or about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The racial-liberal worldview that frames colonial governance, based as it is on the denial of self-determination in the name of a "colourblind" egalitarianism that denies the persistent whiteness of power in Australia, is strongly opposed to the actual freeing up of "free speech."

Second, and relatedly, the government responded to the Uluru Statement by claiming that it "does not believe such a radical change to our constitution's representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians." There are in fact good grounds for such a fear, although they should not serve as the basis for rejecting the proposed Makarrata Commission. Precisely because White-Aboriginal relations have been framed predominantly in terms of benevolence met with ungratefulness, there are doubts over whether an Aboriginal representative council would be favourably received given current political and media optics.

Lisa Lowe again explains the centrality of liberal ideas of benevolence for the development of racial-colonial rule. She cites John Stuart Mill, whose Considerations on Representative Government (1861) is a foundational text of liberal democracy, and who was an official of that linchpin of British colonial rule in India, the East India Company. For Mill, the East India Company was the best example of "good government" and, in the final chapter of Representative Government he bemoans its demise. Only authoritarian rule over Indians, whose former exposure to "bad government" had denied them the development of the capacities of "reason, restraint and tolerance" would eventually lead India on the path to liberty and civilization, according to Mill. The East India Company provided the model for good government by using the law, backed up by military power, to subdue any revolt against the maintenance of "order and progress."

The Australian government does not believe that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are capable of self-representation because of the depth of Australia's liberal-racial commitment to instilling "order and progress" which can only be ensured through white rule. The construction of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as intrinsically unruly has long colonial roots, and is evident in multiple ways to this day: through the removal of children from their families; over-incarceration; the sequestration of welfare; the micro-management of all aspects of Indigenous sociality. The admiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and heritage expressed by many comfortably coexists with infantilization and mistrust. While many Australians are supportive of significant, but largely symbolic, accommodations to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples - such as the recent decisions by several local councils not to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January - self-governance would only find support were it to be accompanied by a significant shift in the current shape of the Australian "racial state."

Until we all start to work actively to decolonize Australia - that is, to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by vacating space for them to determine their own futures and define the shape of their own governance - true coexistence based on mutual respect will be a long time in the making.

Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University, and President of the Alana Lentin is Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University, and President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association.