Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African American Performance by Marvin McAllister (review)

The next time you walk through a crowded area, observe how you maneuver around people of varying ethnicity. It could be a street corner, a department store, a subway car, or even a baseball stadium. Who crosses in front of you? Who crosses behind you? Who steps aside when your paths meet? In short, who controls the space? Marvin McAllister examines this question both literally and figuratively in his surprisingly complex book, Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels & Stage Europeans in African American Performance. While McAllister singles out the theatric stage for his study, readers would do well to keep one eye on the broader effects of racial positioning on all human interaction in America. In fact, McAllister provides compelling evidence that race itself is performance and American theater highlights America’s practice of racial dehumanization.

The University of South Carolina assistant professor of English and African American studies challenges the reader to join a representational revolution where “a mature American theater means actors of all colors should have access to every race, ethnicity, gender, and class in a performative spectrum” (233, 241). Regarding race, McAllister focuses on people designated as white or black in America. Defining these roles and who gets to perform them on stage forms the heart of McAllister’s analysis. When a person categorized as black performs a white role, McAllister terms those live stage performances as whiting up. McAllister asserts whiting up is a legitimate artistic tradition worthy of study, though he violates his own parameters to do so, a problem I will address later.

The two performance types of whiting up are Whiteface, mimicking white behavior or appearance, and Stage Europeans, defined as blacks inhabiting roles created for whites. For a cinematic comparison, one may consider the Wayans Brothers’ performance in the titular roles of White Girls as an example of whiteface, and Idris Elba’s performance as the Norse god Heimdall in Thor as Stage Europeanism.

McAllister lays out his book according to what he describes as four distinct cultural and political functions of whiting up: first, subtle satire aimed at undermining racial hierarchies, as can be read in chapters 3, 4, and 6; second, imitation with the goal of identifying with white institutions, found in chapters 2, 3, and 4; third, performance meant to warn black America of “white terror,” explained in chapter 5; and fourth, transferring white behavior to black bodies in order to identify both with and against majority culture, explored in chapter 6.

To understand Whiting Up, one must view whiteness as a commodity whose value is directly related to both its scarcity and use. The author terms it as “possessive investment” where both white and black theatrical participants (performer, audience, critic, director, writer, and theater owner) seek to govern who may possess whiteness and under what circumstances. Whiting up, in essence, is a form of borrowing whiteness. At the risk of oversimplification, McAllister seems to postulate whites would be content to allow blacks to borrow whiteness for the sole purpose of entertainment, while blacks seek to use this commodity for the cultural and political functions described above.

McAllister traces the earliest form of this commodity exchange, the Country Dance, to accounts recorded by a shadowy figure known as The Stranger, a presumably white man who spied on free and enslaved blacks and anonymously reported his findings to the South Carolina Gazette (26). Country Dances involved enslaved blacks who, typically on holidays, visited the homes of free blacks and spent time drinking, dancing, gambling, fighting, and sharing stories, all spoils of whiteness, in the opinion of The Stranger. The Stranger would then use his secretly observed accounts of blacks scornfully “taking off the manners of their masters” to successfully advocate for the 1735 Negro Act, creating tougher restrictions on black movement, assemblage, and the possession of items associated with leisure and comfort (27). McAllister rightly questions the reliability of The Stranger’s accounts as the author tip-toes through minefields...