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paint black

Idioms  
  1. Represent someone or something as evil or harmful. This idiom is most often used in a negative context, as in He's not so black as he's been painted. [Late 1500s]


Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

As reported in Smithsonian Magazine in 2020, all it takes is to paint black one-half of one blade.

From Seattle Times

Gleaming under a fresh coat of white paint, black trim and mist-green highlights, it tugs on lines that creak from the marina’s gentle surge.

From Los Angeles Times

Still, we don’t want to live in a world where only Black artists are commissioned to paint Black people and only white artists to paint white people, where men are to be rendered by men, women by women, and so on.

From New York Times

At the same time, he said, the new work “responds to global Blackness, not just a localized California sense of where we are. I wake up, there’s a global pandemic, what do you do, who do you paint? You paint Black and brown people surrounding you. And it turns out those same bodies that have no political, social, demographic relationship to the country that you come from are all indicted within this language of Blackness, this language of skin.”

From Los Angeles Times

Slater believed he’d found someone to carry out the job and instructed them to spray paint “Black Lives Matter” at the scene of the crime, according to investigators.

From Seattle Times