whitewashed

CEFRB2

/wˈaɪˌtwɑʃt/

adjective · verb

Türkçe translations

Translating…

In plain English

01
adjective
Covered with white paint or presented as better than it really is.
02
adjective
Extra detail
Having had any controversy or potential for scandal removed, ignored or downplayed.

Examples

At a glance

Sits at B2 on the CEFR scale

Deep Dive

Extra meanings

Painted with the temporary paint whitewash.
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).

Extra meaning

In context

To whitewash means to cover a surface with a thin and white paint.
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.
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?

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Question 1 · Quick check

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The word in print, with each source given in full.

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."
2025 July 10, Jesus Mesa, “'We've Been Played': MAGA Faces Its Own Disappointment With Trump”, in Newsweek
"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."
2021, Dave Zirin, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World, The New Press, →ISBN, page 153
[…] the “scandal” over actress Kerry Washington's seemingly whitewashed skin on the cover of the February 2015 InStyle Magazine, […]
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
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 […]
2017, Rebecca Janicker, Reading American Horror Story: Essays on the Television Franchise, McFarland, →ISBN

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From whitewash + -ed.