The Wizard of Oz was not written by a Nazi, contrary to popular belief. L. Frank Baum was a man of his time, thoughts on race included, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that much of his work contains racist,agest, sexist, and all around old fashion ideas. However by looking at how the works of Oz have changed over time, we see how racial coding impacts the reception of a work.
In 1900 Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and while it is generally believed to discuss the socio economic fluctuations of a bimetallic economy in the late 1800s, whether there is intentional allegory at all is a contentious point. The perceived allegorical statements of the book are in line with Baum’s liberal use of coding, or shorthand character signifiers. This type of coding has some unfortunately racist outcomes that fundamentally alter thematic elements of the story.
The Winkies (See Figure 5), a fictional race that resides in the Ozian east (See Figure 6), are slaves to the Wicked Witch of the West, which Baum mentions no less than 4 times. They are described as yellow skinned, cowardly, and big nosed. On the day they are freed from subjugation they dance, sing, and feast, then keep the day as a holiday. All of these are thinly veiled references to the Jewish public interacts with semetic ideals.
Figure 5 Figure 6
Their appearance is toned down significantly in the movie adaptation, as visual mediums can’t portrayed as weak. While the level of coding differs, the ideals are still part of their time.
The Wiz is almost a step forward. It’s lengthy scene where the wicked witch lords over her sweatshop workers is tonally… bad, but lacks the insidious subliminal messaging of its predecessors, likely due to its writers own experience with prejudice.
We see the first active subversion of the trope with 1995’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. The western country of Oz is no longer the “Winkey Country”, but the Vinkus (See Figure 7), a region whose inhabitants are coded starkly Native American.
Figure 7
The Wicked witch’s love interest, Fiyero, is the prince of the Vinkus. He has cultural tattoos, ceremonial garb, and has notably dark skin. The whole book is dedicated to anti-fascism but instead of the Winkies being a stand in for oppressed people, Animals (with a capital letter) like the cowardly Lion, are the subjugated race. Fiyero himself faces microaggressions, but never realizes the full extent of the problem until he witnesses the beating of an innocent Bear cub. This shift in textual coding proves relevant to the thematic changes. Fiyero is a displaced king of a dying people. He dies for finally defending the rights of the damned.
Wicked the musical, Oz the Great and the Powerful, The Muppets Wizard of Oz, and most of the other intermittent Oz adaptations have no detailed portrayal of the Winkies. While most feature the Witch, they use the flying monkeys as stand in slaves, rather than deal with the consequences of the negative stigma coded into the source material.
While coding may seem innocuous, it isn’t made in a contextless vacuum. Using this type of thinly veiled language is an easy way to propagate existing hate, and frame dissenters as a oversensitive. Hatred seeps from most types of coding, and leaves a story poorer for it.
Cold Critical 