whitewashed

From whitewash +‎ -ed.

whitewashed

1. simple past and past participle of whitewash

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.
   • 2025 July 10, Jesus Mesa, “'We've Been Played': MAGA Faces Its Own Disappointment With Trump”, in Newsweek‎^[1]:

     Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser and still-influential MAGA voice, posed the question others were already repeating: "How does an anti–deep state administration put out something this whitewashed? This is not what people voted for."

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."

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