this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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OP ~~meant~~ did not mean whitewash like painting a fence.
death to english death to america
I heard Israeli soldiers sometimes vacation in India and listen to trance while taking ecstacy. Is that whitewashing in any way?
You may be right, I'm not confident in using the term whitewashing. I more reserve it for visual examples, like American football fans wearing Native American feather headresses at games with colors of their team painted on their face.
When it comes to actions, I don't have many examples... I feel that if you go into the process of spiritual self work in a space where you're a guest, and corrupt it with a white colonial attitude, that is whitewashing.
oh uh there's colorism and a bunch of like skin bleaching kinda shit in Indian media, i thought you meant sanitizing atrocities and stuff.
i think you're describing appropriation rather than anything i'd call whitewashing.
Oh okay, I'll just say appropriation.
Whitewashing has two meanings:
Most commonly, it means depicting something as "good" that is evil, like making excuses for crimes.
But the term "___washing," derived from the above, is used to talk about various ways of misrepresenting things. For example, "pinkwashing" or "rainbow washing" is when someone uses queer identity as a way of laundering their reputation, like talking about how progressive it is that the drone program has lesbian pilots. I suppose it's possible that portrayals of Jesus or Ancient Rome could be called "whitewashing" in the sense that they are misrepresented as being white, but that's an abnormal use of the term.
Yeah whitewashing is a great word to use because in a fence it’s a periodic activity to not just change the color of something, but to make that natural color a part of the built environment and keep the now completely dead object from decomposing.