While it's horrible a cafe owner refused to hire a black man because of the colour of his skin, it's even more shocking that he thought he was speaking the accepted language of the whole country, writes Luke Johnson.

This time last week, we, the discerning coffee drinkers of inner-city Sydney, were offended to learn that our snobbery had reached a new high. Or, rather, a new low.

A black Brazilian man was refused a job as a barista because, as the owner of the Forbes & Burton café in Darlinghurst allegedly put it: "My customers are white and they don't like to have black people making coffee for them."

On one level, the reaction to this event has been quite encouraging. Patrons walked out of the café mid-sip, an employee resigned on the spot, and the media condemned what appeared to be an obvious act of racism. Learning that the owner of the café has himself only immigrated to Australia in the past nine months provided some sense of relief. Quite simply: this man isn't a real Australian; thus, what we have here is an act of racism in Australia, but not of Australia. Phew! - close call.

The question of what could possibly lead somebody who has been in the country for less than a year to conclude that this is the attitude of his newly chosen community has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Or, at least, handled with extreme care.

There are several possible ways of responding to such a question. The reassuring ones have all been covered and can be summarised under one neat point: nothing. Nothing would or did lead him to draw this conclusion; the man has an aberrant prejudice against people with black skin and, in exercising this prejudice, has erroneously assumed that the rest of us share his views. We don't. End of story - or to put it in the words of one of the café's Facebook critics: "Who the hell does he think he is? He isn't even an Australian citizen and he's telling us what we prefer in OUR country?? Go back to China mate. You're not welcome here."

The alternative is that this was a genuine appraisal from someone trying, however poorly, to find a position within an adopted discourse. A far less comfortable thought.

The incident reminds me of a joke I overheard in my workplace several years ago: Two black immigrants arrive in Australia determined to out-assimilate each other. A year on, they meet up to see who has managed to become the most Australian in this 12-month period. The first man rattles off a list of clichés that demonstrate his deep Australianness; the second calls him a black so-and-so and turns away in disgust.

If this indeed is a racist joke, as the teller unashamedly promoted it, then it is a self-conscious one, relying on a sort of meta-racist logic: a racist joke that speaks of Australia's tolerance of racist jokes, or something to that effect. The real punch line, it's hard not to see, is that cognisance is often more crass than cliché.

In a fortnight in which two of our least experienced politicians have made offensive and downright ridiculous remarks against China - Clive Palmer on Q&A, and then Jacqui Lambie via press release - the judgement of this café owner becomes more understandable.

So, the Palmer United crew do not represent the views of most Australians, we tell ourselves. Only, the problem with this argument is that they do - if not literally, then at least formally. These are our elected spokespeople. When they speak, they do damage on our behalf. If not at the level of foreign relations, then in the cafés where we drink our morning coffees.

As chance would have it, I met with a student last week to discuss a piece of creative non-fiction she is working on for a class I teach at a university located just a few suburbs from the Forbes and Burton café. The woman requested the meeting because she was worried about reading her piece aloud in class. This is a class where admiring imitators of Bret Easton Ellis's hyper-violent fiction read their work without anyone batting an eye. What could possibly be so terrible about this politely-spoken woman's writing that she felt the need to meet with me in advance?

"It's about my experience of being a Malaysian immigrant living in Australia," she told me.

"Great," I said. "Sounds interesting."

She looked at me with a certain distrust. "It isn't very ... nice."

"Good fiction rarely is," I assured her.

"Yes, but I'm worried what everyone will say."

After a lot of dancing around the point, we arrived at the heart of the matter: immigration hasn't been a very positive experience for her. In fact, it's been the polar opposite of positive.

What upset me most was not hearing of the daily discrimination she has faced in the six months since arriving here, but her fear at daring to mention such things.

In Malaysia, she worked as a journalist; she isn't afraid of ruffling feathers. But in this matter, she was terrified with how the other students in the class would react to her experiences and perspective. This is a liberal inner-city university we are talking about - a long cry from the shearing shed where I overheard the joke all those years ago. Knowing the 20 or so students in the class as I do, I felt quite comfortable in assuring her that she could write freely and without fear of condemnation. But did she believe me? No, I don't think she did.

The Brazilian man at the centre of this most recent outrage was more sure of his audience, turning what might have passed as another silent act of discrimination into a public spectacle - and good on him for doing so.

The remarkable thing, however, is not that people came to his support, but that the owner of the café must have felt equally confident that the crowd would rally behind him: that he seemed quite earnestly to believe that he was indeed speaking the language of Australia.

Luke Johnson holds a PhD in Literary Theory, and lectures in the humanities at the University of Technology, Sydney, University of Sydney, and University of Wollongong. View his full profile here.