blackwash

blackwash

English

Etymology

black +‎ -wash or black +‎ wash (depending on sense)

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ækwɒʃ

Noun

blackwash (countable and uncountable, plural blackwashes)

1. (slang, New Zealand) A whitewash victory for any New Zealand national sporting team.
2. (slang, cricket) A whitewash victory for the West Indies cricket team. Started in the 1984–86 "Blackwash" series of the West Indian cricket team in England in 1984.
3. (medicine) A lotion made by mixing calomel and limewater.
4. (slang, mining) Public campaigns and advertising funded by the coal industry to draw attention away from environmentally unsustainable practices or to justify exclusion from carbon taxes.
5. (chiefly politics) A villainization campaign.

Synonyms

• (New Zealand victory): blackout

Antonyms

• (villainization): whitewash

Derived terms

• blackwashing
• blackwashed

Verb

blackwash (third-person singular simple present blackwashes, present participle blackwashing, simple past and past participle blackwashed)

1. (transitive) To villainize, to present in a damaging light.
   • 1904, George Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island‎, page lxii:

     Mistrusting my own prejudices, I have taken the story from the two parliamentary papers in which our officials have done their utmost to whitewash the tribunals and the pigeon-shooting party, and to blackwash the villagers.

2. (transitive) To blacken, to cover with a black color.
   • 2004, Peter Plate, Fogtown‎, page 109:

     The masts of British frigates and U.S. warships blackwashed the piers at the Embarcadero.

   • 1892, Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth Pulpit: Sermons Preached in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, Sept 1873-Sept 1874, Volume 2:

     I do not care whether a man whitewashes or blackwashes his fence, or whether he uses guano or barnyard manure, or what his mode of cultivation may be, the question is, Does he get good fruit?

3. (transitive) To portray in a revisionist fashion as belonging to a black race of people.
   • 2019, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Stick to the Skin (page 102)

     Basquiat's epic-size, experimental canvases betray his radical determination to blackwash not solely history but art history.

Antonyms

• (villainize): whitewash

Anagrams

• black haws