Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Sometime in the past few days, a black comedian, Andrew Desbordes (stage name Druski), showed up at a NASCAR event in whiteface to see if he would fit in and presumably to get a behind the scenes view of the inherent racism of white NASCAR fans.  

The makeup work is astonishingly brilliant.  And that's about the most that can be said. 

On the right there has been outrage at the stunt.  Much commentary along these lines.

The issue with this guy is not the "whiteface."

The issue is that while wearing it, he spit at genuine black men and called them "boy."

See, he thought if he went to a NASCAR race he would find a whole bunch of white racists, and finding none, he had to invent one himself.… https://t.co/ObLXmkFPqf

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) September 5, 2025

An earlier comedian, Eddy Murphy had whiteface skit, White Like Me, back in 1984 about going undercover to discover what those white people are up to when blacks aren't around.  

Double click to enlarge.

That in turn, hearkened back to the much more serious Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin in 1961.  Griffin was a white journalist who disguised himself as a black man in order to be able to tell White America about the experience of being black in America.  

I have seen no reference to this past whiteface/blackface comedic/investigative tradition during the current uproar.  

Even more glaring is the absence of commentary about the fact that the left, every five or ten years has a go at NASCAR.  They are firmly convinced that every NASCAR fan is a knuckle dragging, mouth breathing racist.  And every time, to their astonishment, they find out it is just regular people having good fun.

In April 2006, NBC's Dateline sent Arab Americans to NASCAR races to document anti-Muslim bias.  The plan leaked out, leading to much uproar and cancellation of the segment.  Some professor at a local college attempted to duplicate the effort but with clownishly exaggerated effect (not unlike Murphy's intentionally comedic skit).  A sheikh and wife in burkha arrive at NASCAR.  They had the courage to produce a documentary where the strongest responses were essentially mild bemusement.

There was yet another earlier effort sometime in the mid or late nineties (which I can't find), where a group tried to document racist attitudes towards blacks attending NASCAR by sponsoring a group of blacks to attend and who came away with a short report of having had a convivial day.  

Are there racists floating around?  Sure.  Might there be a greater concentration at NASCAR?  Possibly.  But every five or ten years it seems that someone tries to document that there is deep and overt racist sentiments among NASCAR fans and every five or ten years they end up documenting that the most overt racism is among those doing the reporting.