white up

present singular third person whites up · participle present whiting up · participle past whited up · past whited up

1. intransitiveliterallytransitiveTo become or make (something) white.
2. intransitivetransitiveTo put on or wear whiteface.

   ...performance reception was hardly a possibility in 1940s America, which is why the producers had to white up Lee.

   2011, Marvin Edward McAllister, Whiting Up, →ISBN

   4 more examples

   The final scene is a ritual penitence: as he leaves the park, he comes upon a student rag group, all whited up as clowns.

   1971, Roy Huss -, Focus on Blow-up, page 41

   White Chicks deploys a "reverse" minstrel show technique. Instead of whites "blacking up" to ridicule the oppressed Other, black men (Shawn and Marlon Wayans) "white up" to reveal and critique various instantiations of whiteness.

   2012, George Yancy, Look, A White!: Philosophical Essays on Whiteness, →ISBN, page 111

   Nick Hedges was a disciple of the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, whose style was for all the performers to white up their face like clowns and move very slowly.

   2012, David Walliams, Camp David, →ISBN, page lxxxviii

   In Ghana and Cape Town, Jamaica and Trinidad, local performers blacked up (and whited up and redded up) and created a global form with politics more slippery than anything T. D. Rice ever imagined.

   2014, Andrew Levy, Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece, →ISBN