Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions draw on racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” culpability in oil as development. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwashing. Drawing from a decade of research on and along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, we show how multiscalar actors converged to assert knowledge of, responsibility for, and collaborations with “local” people within a racialized politics of scale. These corporate representations of the racialized “local” are coded through long-standing colonial tropes. We identify three interrelated and overlapping flexian elite rhetoric(s) and practices of racialized localwashing: (1) anguishing, (2) arrogating, and (3) admonishing. These elite representations of a racialized “local” reveal diversionary efforts “from above” to manage public opinion, displace blame for project failures, and domesticate dissent in a context of persistent scrutiny and criticism from international and regional advocates and activists. Key Words: coloniality, decolonial, elite, extraction, racism.

为了响应人们对采掘业中“从上而下”行动和反应的更多关注，我们对公司实体和跨国机构如何利用种族化的“本地”苦难，“本地”咨询和石油在发展中具有“局部”责任。这种修辞功能可以在我们称为局部清洗的一系列实践中使采掘干预合法化。通过对乍得-喀麦隆输油管道及其沿线地区的十年研究，我们展示了多尺度参与者如何在种族化的规模政治中融合为主张“本地”人的知识，责任和与他们的合作。种族化的“本地”的这些公司表示形式通过长期存在的殖民比喻进行编码。我们确定了三个相互关联和重叠的柔韧性精英修辞和种族化局部清洗的实践：（1）痛苦，（2）傲慢和（3）告诫。这些对种族化的“本地人”的精英表现表明，在国际和地区倡导者和活动家不断进行的审查和批评的背景下，“从上”为管理公众舆论，为项目失败承担责任，以及异议化的努力。关键词：殖民地，殖民地，精英，提取，种族主义。