Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white rac...