white up

English

Verb

white up (third-person singular simple present whites up, present participle whiting up, simple past and past participle whited up)

1. To wear whiteface.
   • 1971, Roy Huss -, Focus on Blow-up, page 41:

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

   • 2011, Marvin Edward McAllister, Whiting Up, →ISBN:

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

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

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

     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.

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

     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.