whitewashed

English

Etymology

whitewash +‎ -ed

Verb

whitewashed

1. simple past and past participle of whitewash

Adjective

whitewashed (comparative more whitewashed, superlative most whitewashed)

1. Of or pertaining to a fence or wall that has been painted with the temporary paint whitewash.
2. Having had any controversy or potential for scandal removed, ignored or downplayed.
3. Having been subjected to racial whitewashing: made to be or seem more white (Caucasian); for example, having been made to appear whiter via makeup, or by being illustrated in pictures or portrayed in films as white (despite originally or properly being nonwhite).
   • 2012, Stuart Hallerman, quoted in Mark Yarm, Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, Crown (→ISBN), page 59:

     Hiro's a Japanese guy, Kim's an Indian guy. The transition for the three of us, goin' from a very mixed Chicago area to the very whitewashed Northwest, was kinda weird. It took me years to kinda deal with, Is this a real city? Where are the other people?

   • 2015, JeffriAnne Wilder, Color Stories: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century: Black Women and Colorism in the 21st Century, ABC-CLIO, →ISBN, page 12:

     […] the “scandal” over actress Kerry Washington's seemingly whitewashed skin on the cover of the February 2015 InStyle Magazine,  […]

   • 2017, Rebecca Janicker, Reading American Horror Story: Essays on the Television Franchise, McFarland, →ISBN:

     By casting Paulson in this role while continuing to describe her characters in this way, the show applies racist speech to a whitewashed body, thereby appropriating the history but erasing the bodies of Chang and Eng. This whitewashing ignores the [...] racism [...] that inform[s] both Chang and Eng's story […]

   • 2016', anonymous pageant participant, in Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain, Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants, U of Minnesota Press (→ISBN), page 86:

     She tries to portray that she is the Japanese American woman. That she is very cultured in a Japanese way but she is not! She is very whitewashed.

   • 2021, Dave Zirin, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, The New Press, →ISBN, page 153:

     "Beyond that the thinking was, 'Slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, so how is the United States still racist?' That's kind of the mind-set I grew up in. Going to a public school in a very white state, I was given a very whitewashed education."

Antonyms

• (antonym(s) of "removed, ignored, downplayed"): blackwashed