white up

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

1. (literally, transitive, intransitive) To become or make (something) white.
2. (transitive, intransitive) To put on or 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.