The March for Dignity saw 20,000 people march from Barbès to Bastille in Paris last Saturday, against “out of control daily humiliations, suspicion, Islamophobia, negrophobia and police crimes”.

It was called for and led by the “Mafed collective of women experiencing racism” and supported by a host of international decolonial and antiracist activists, scholars and public figures – including the former Black Panther, Angela Davis.

On the same day, Welcome to Australia held Walk Together events across the country with the aim of demonstrating that Australia can be “a nation known for our compassion, generosity and welcome”. The message, “real Australians say welcome”, places emphasis on the Australian mythology of the “fair go”.

It’s particularly incongruous in a country founded on colonial dispossession and genocide but the notion of “real Australians” is also pitted against those in the category of the “un-Australian”: a growing list to which Malcolm Turnbull recently added those who “find Australian values unpalatable”, among the regular boat-arriving “queue-jumpers”.

The fact that an anti-racist initiative uses the language of nationalist authenticity – “real Australians” – is revealing of the fact that organisations like Welcome to Australia mainly talk among themselves; the supposed “ordinary” (read: white) Australians.

The acceptable face of anti-racism is organised around the comforting of these ordinary Australians. This is why, for example, mainstream pro-refugee activism places emphasis on the removal of children (innocent, unlike their parents) from detention rather than on closing the camps and on successful boycott and divestment campaigns such as Divestment from Detention.

From this point of view, racism is seen as something that can be equally committed by both hegemonic white Australians and “minoritised” groups, particularly Muslims, who are portrayed as posing a threat to Australian national cohesion.

This dislocation of the roots of racism – colonialism, slavery, the post-immigration nation-state and its racialised borders – is ahistorical. It works to the detriment of racialised people, like migrants and asylum seekers, for whom the only “legitimate” option integration into a framework of national identification whose goalposts are constantly shifting: the elusive “real Australian”.

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s definition of casual racism does not link it to the history of race.

This is the framework the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, thinks of as “liberal democratic” and “highly cohesive”. In an article in the Age, Soutphommasane used Walk Together as a springboard for celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Racial Discrimination Act.

While acknowledging the (unspecified) “more insidious forms” of racism that do not involve “an ugly incident on public transport”, he focuses his support for the RDA on its ability “not only to protect all Australians from discrimination but to maintain our community harmony”.

The Australian community, he is keen to underline, is mainly happy with diversity. When racism appears, it does so in the guise of offence, humiliation and intimidation – in spite of our multicultural harmoniousness – momentarily upsetting the status quo in which everyone “rubs along” quite nicely.

Racism, in a liberal democracy, then, seems limited to isolated acts of individual prejudice. The racism committed in the name of liberal democracy; of the border industrial complex, of the immigration regime, of the policing and incarceration systems, of welfare, of education are neglected in favour of the emphasis on what Soutphommasane has termed the “casual racism” of everyday interactions.

While not downplaying the impact of what others have called microaggressions on personal and societal wellbeing, it is revealing that the Australian Human Rights Commission’s definition of casual racism does not link it to the history of race or its embeddedness in the white power structures of “western” states that developed historically within liberal culture (and not despite it).

This view on racism makes it appear both individualised and extreme. Soutphommasane, in his fight against racism, must certainly be limited by mainstream expectations in the current political climate. So, he recalls “controversial Dutch politician”, Geert Wilders’ recent visit to Australia to help launch the anti-Islam Australian Liberty Alliance.

While noting that what he calls “protest groups have stoked anti-Muslim feeling”, he worries about the “problem of violent extremism” among Muslims. Responding to critiques of the government’s deradicalisation agenda from some Muslim groups, Soutphommasane claimed it is “absurd” to reject “our liberal democratic values” and deny Australian multiculturalism.

The government’s deradicalisation agenda, coupled with its punitive profiling of young religious Muslims as potential terrorists – who are policed in their homes, schools and at the border – is not assessed against the supposed supremacy of liberal democracy.

Instead, a false equivocation is made between far right groups and Islamist groups. They are portrayed as presenting an equal challenge to an intrinsically non-racist, “fair go” Australian centre.

In reality, both sides define themselves with reference to the dominant myth of Australian liberal democratic values, paradoxically giving it the importance neither thinks it deserves.

Viewed from the liberal standpoint, racism is seen as existing only at these two extreme ends – the Islamist and the far rightwing – both united in their common rejection of multiculturalism, conveniently made synonymous with “Australian values”.

Standing back as though unimplicated, liberal democracy is proposed as the solution to racism. By comforting middle Australia by repeating the myths of its inherent fairness, systemic racism which, today, holds Muslims of all political hues at the forefront of its sights, the proponents of liberalism leave the structures of racism in place by locating it outside itself.

A commitment to ending racism must be uncomfortable, involving – as the marchers on Paris declared – “a duty of insolence” to the structures and fantasies of liberal culture that mask the violence committed in its name.