black and white

black and white

1. Literally, lacking bright colors, as of a monochromatic image. In what decade did color movies start to replace black and white ones?
2. Of the utmost clarity; clearly defined or differentiated; without any room for confusion, ambiguity, or discrepancy. Love isn't always black and white, you know. You have to accept that there are many gray areas in relationships. Don't debate me about it. The rules are black and white, and you broke them.
See also: and, black, white
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

black and white

1. A monochromatic picture, drawing, television image, computer monitor, or film, as opposed to one using many colors, as in Photos in black and white fade less than those taken with color film. [Late 1800s]
2. Also, black or white. Involving a very clear distinction, without any gradations. For example, He tended to view everything as a black and white issue-it was either right or wrong-whereas his partner always found gray areas . This usage is based on the association of black with evil and white with virtue, which dates back at least 2,000 years. [Early 1800s] Also see gray area.
3. in black and white. Written down or in print, and therefore official. For example, The terms of our agreement were spelled out in black and white, so there should be no question about it . This term alludes to black ink or print on white paper. Shakespeare used it in Much Ado about Nothing (5:1). [Late 1500s]
See also: and, black, white
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.

(in) black and ˈwhite

(as) absolutely right or wrong, good or bad, with no grades between them: My grandmother has very rigid ideas of character and behaviour; she sees everything in black and white. It’s not a black-and-white issue.
See also: and, black, white
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

black and white

n. the police; a black and white police patrol car; any police car. Call the black and whites. We got trouble here.
See also: and, black, white
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • get (one's) teeth into (something)
  • get one’s teeth into something
  • get teeth into
  • get your teeth into
  • get your teeth into something
  • get/sink your teeth into something
  • sink (one's) teeth in
  • get (one's) teeth in
  • sink (one's) teeth into (something)
  • sink teeth into
References in periodicals archive
Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South.
Focusing on the wrong front: historical displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye
With this sexual imagery so prevalent in the discourse surrounding colonization, it is not surprising that supporters of the movement often let slip their own fears of social and sexual contact between white and black Americans, which they merged under the label of "amalgamation." [30] Although colonization publications did not abound with alarmist rhetoric about sex or marriage between black and white Americans, the amalgamation argument still underpinned nearly every pronouncement of the necessity of separating the two races.
A GENDERED HISTORY OF AFRICAN COLONIZATION IN THE ANTEBELLUM UNITED STATES
At one point Jones thinks that if he could "just get over the notion [that] women were the same, black and white" (130).
Love Jones: a black male feminist critique of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go
(19.) See, for instance, Hall's account of why lynching is as much about keeping women, both black and white, in their place as it is about suppressing black men.
Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon
Yet neither Herrnstein and Murray nor any credentialed believer in the brain-gene theory has suggested how, on an evolutionary basis, black and white intelligence DNA could have diverged significantly.
The case against 'The Bell Curve.' (books that links IQ to race)
Like the national CP, the local party was ambivalent about jobs boycotting for fear of dividing Black and white workers.
'Buy where you can work': boycotting for jobs in African-American Baltimore, 1933-1934
"a black and white marble floor" (16), "a dark brightness" (20)--all of which point to Sarah's internal struggle.
Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and (Dis)Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays
Linda Gordon, "Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890-1945," Journal of American History (September 1991): 559-589.
The care of dependent African-American children in Chicago: the struggle between black self-help and professionalism
One was the Populist Party of the 1890s, which briefly united black and white small farmers.
The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present
They wanted to create "the first real Negro folk comedy," a play whose authenticity would stand in sharp contrast to the stereotypical portrayals of black characters and culture in the era's popular dramas, both black and white. [3] Yet the composition of Mule Bone cannot be rightly appraised if taken in isolation, for it would emerge as the dramatic result of Hughes and Hurston's lifelong literary declarations of artistic independence, the tangible proof that the credo of the Harlem Renaissance as e xpressed in Locke's "The New Negro" (1925) had borne fruit.
Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Dream Deferred of an African-American Theatre of the Black Word
The presence of black soldiers in Memphis, and their relations with both black and white residents of the city, are central to understanding the riot.
"Your old father Abe Lincoln is dead and damned": black soldiers and the Memphis race riot of 1866
I also remember him drunk, for like many of Wade's poor male residents, black and white, he turned to the bottle to escape his problems.
The day I learned I was a racist
Washington, casts the mixed-race character as a culturally placeless entity, a perception held not only by Chesnutt but also by his black and white acquaintances.
Neither Fish, flesh, Nor Fowl: Race and Region in the Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt
They asserted that rank and not race, regulation and not custom, should structure relations between black and white servicemen.
The "Double-V" campaign in World War II Hawaii: African Americans, racial ideology, and federal power
These parallel movements--toward "standard" speech and toward an idealized bourgeois future--conjoin to form what I call the voice-narrative of progress, which operated in a wide variety of black and white texts in the nineteenth century.
Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy