Play the white man is a term used in parts of England meaning to be decent and trustworthy in one's actions.
The origin of the phrase is obscure. The term carries with it a reference to an obligation which outnumbered English civil administrators in the latter years of the British Empire might have considered themselves to be under: that is, the obligation to uphold respect for their county abroad by maintaining personal standards of behavior and fairness which darker-skinned native peoples could respect. The act of calling upon someone to remember his personal moral obligations in this way is expressed in Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden. On the other hand, the racially neutral color white has long been associated with pureness and virtue.
A similar expression in the United States is "That's mighty white of you", meaning, "Thank you for being fair". Among African Americans, this phrase is said in response to being patronized or told what to think.
Famous quotes containing the words play the, play, white and/or man:
“Do I lack madmen, that you have brought this fellow to play the madman in my presence?”
—Bible: Hebrew, 1 Samuel 21:15.
A King, said of David who pretends to be mad.
“We [actors] are indeed a strange lot! There are times we doubt that we have any emotions we can honestly call our own. I have approached every dynamic scene change in my life the same way. When I married Charlie MacArthur, I sat down and wondered how I could play the best wife that ever was.... My love for him was the truest thing in my life; but it was still important that I love him with proper effect, that I act loving him with great style, that I achieve the ultimate in wifedom.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)