As noted by @phils in the comment below, the Emacs manual suggests not modifying the face-remapping-alist directly due to possible unintended side effects: . . .to avoid trampling on remappings applied elsewhere. Thus, (setq-local face-remapping-alist '((stripe-highlight (:background "white" :foreground "black")))) is not considered to be the preferred method. Instead, the Emacs manual suggests using a function such as face-remap-add-relative:
(face-remap-add-relative 'stripe-highlight '((:foreground "black" :background "yellow"))) Here is a link to additional Emacs documentation on this issue: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Face-Remapping.html