wash a blackamoor white

• wash the blackamoor white, wash blackamoors white

wash a blackamoor white (third-person singular simple present washes a blackamoor white, present participle washing a blackamoor white, simple past and past participle washed a blackamoor white)

1. (idiomatic, dated, now often offensive) To labour in vain, especially so as to present something as better than it really is; to whitewash.

   Synonyms: wash a negro white, (very offensive) wash a nigger white

   • 1778, John van Rymsdyk, Andreas van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum […], page 33:

     It is not my Intention to put myself in a Perspiration concerning any of the Hieroglyphic Emblems, or Monstrosities of the Egyptians, for it is all Labour in vain, or washing a Blackamoor white.

   • 1786 November 29, “Invisibilis”, “To the Captain”, in Bostonian Scintillations; or, A War of Words […], published 1787, page 30:

     And universally, all Endeavours to vindicate a bad Cause, are but making it the worse. The Moral in my Last Paper was intended to caution you against attempting to wash the Blackamoor white: but you are resolved to struggle.

   • 1874, Arthur Lionel Smith, Erasmus: The Lothian Prize Essay, 1874, page 25:

     Folly then announces herself as the bright being whose mere aspect dispels all gloom; her present purpose being a panegyric upon herself, “which, who dares say he has a better claim than I to pronounce? and is not this candour better than a rhetorician’s apish display of his power to wash a blackamoor white? […]”

   • 1932 [1930], Johannes Haller, translated by Dora von Beseler, France and Germany: The History of One Thousand Years, page 262:

     Therefore it is washing a blackamoor white to describe the French pre-war policy as peaceful and defensive. It had chained itself to Russia, and as yet nobody has maintained that the latter’s policy was defensive.

• put lipstick on a pig