Multiculturalism, Authenticity, and Appropriation Theme Analysis

In her short story “White Spirit,” set in modern-day Australia, Cate Kennedy shows the limits of multiculturalism, specifically when these efforts toward diversity are spearheaded by the white people who hold the power in that society. The story focuses on an unnamed, white, Australian narrator who works for a public housing centre and oversees a grant to commission a mural at the centre depicting the different, mostly nonwhite refugee communities living there. As the story goes on, she begins to feel ashamed about the hypocrisy of the mural project, as she comes to see that it celebrates diversity while disregarding the needs of the actual residents. Through the lens of a narrator who realizes her own complicity in existing white power structures, Kennedy reveals how white-led calls for diversity—even if well intended—can appropriate the identities of the non-white peoples intended to be authentically represented.

Kennedy first shows the white capacity for cultural appropriation when the artists hired to work on the mural demonstrate a lack of knowledge about the people they are depicting. When the narrator points out that the kids portrayed in the mural should be holding a soccer ball, instead of the basketball that the artists—Mandy and Jake—had painted, the artists are surprised by this information. They say that this information was “not in [their] brief,” revealing that they don’t know the community they’re depicting in any deep way at all. Mandy then immediately shows a further lack of understanding about the resident community as she tells Jake that “the African kids” play soccer. The artists are either not able or not interested enough to distinguish between the different ethnic groups in the centre, seeing them instead as a homogeneous whole. The residents, accordingly, avoid the artists, even as the narrator recalls how, in Mandy and Jake’s interview, they had expressed interest in getting to know the community during the job and talked about making a “celebration of diversity.” The narrator sees that even if Mandy and Jake’s good intentions of working within the community were heartfelt, in practice they are hollow.

The hypocrisy of the mural and its planning becomes more evident as the residents’ actual behavior differs from the story the mural tells about them. While the mural shows an image of a seamlessly-integrated and happy coalition, the actual residents stand mostly divided by ethnic difference. Further, the residents avoid the mural being painted to celebrate them: the kids who usually play basketball in the gym after school avoid the area entirely now that Mandy and Jake are there. When the narrator asks the resident women in her fabric-painting class if they would want to contribute to painting, they too refuse. That the community isn’t interested in participating in the creation of the mural hints that it is being imposed on the residents—that it is speaking for them, not to them. The narrator also notices differences between how the women in her class are represented in the mural—wearing “traditional” dresses copied from images in library books—versus how the women actually dress, in typical Australian clothing such as “pastel windcheaters” (i.e. windbreakers). The mural is supposed to be an authentic representation of the residents, but it conceals the reality of the community members’ experiences.

In fact, the white characters in the story often fail to recognize how their efforts to celebrate diversity are ultimately self-serving. At the event celebrating the mural, the minister (a local government official) praises the mural’s authenticity, mistakenly believing that the “community…had a hand in creating” the art. The problem with the minister’s faulty assumption isn’t just that it’s wrong; it’s that it’s also lazy. The minister’s assumption is what he wants to believe; he never makes an effort to find out if it’s true or not. Meanwhile, he willfully ignores the actual community’s actions at the event, ignoring that the residents “carefully distance themselves” from the image in the mural. While the mural is ostensibly meant to celebrate the residents, the minister’s behavior makes clear that it instead allows the white people in power to congratulate themselves on their goodness while simultaneously ignoring those they are supposed to be helping.

Right before taking a staged photo with the organizers and residents, the centre manager asks the narrator to get rid of some empty solvent tins left from the mural project, fearing that kids who live in the centre may “sniff them” to get high. The centre manager wants to create a smiling, positive image out of the mural event, while privately thinking disrespectfully of the communities being celebrated. The narrator leaves this interaction with the centre manager angry and disappointed as she realizes that he just wants an image of “local colour,” an image of multiculturalism no matter how inauthentic and fabricated it is in actuality. She then thinks about the solvent itself—called white spirit—which she has been told will be able to clean any graffiti from the mural. She realizes, bitterly, that “no matter what gets scrawled there, whatever message of denial or contradiction” the white spirit will be used to wipe away and ignore it in favor of a white-led positive message.

“White Spirit” shows how often attempts at diversity can be used as manipulative tools that, rather than meeting the needs of the actual people who make up that diversity, ultimately uphold power structures already in place. More specifically, in a white-dominated culture, the story shows how “diversity” is twisted to make the white people feel good about themselves, while the “diverse” people are concealed and ignored behind the false image.