The WICKED Truth About White Womanhood

What the Movie, Wicked, Revealed About Power, Innocence, and Who Gets to Be Called “Good”

Walking Into the Theater: Expectation vs. Impact

I walked into Wicked expecting a musical. Expecting to feel joy.

I love The Wizard of Oz. I love a good show tune. I had never read the Wicked book or seen the play, and I truly thought I was signing up for joyful spectacle, nostalgia, and maybe one song I’d hum while brushing my teeth the next morning.

Instead, I walked out of the theater feeling… unwell.

Not bored. Not unimpressed.

Unsettled. Severely unsettled.

Because sometimes your body knows a truth long before your brain has the language to process it.

It was the kind of unsettled that sits in your chest and refuses to move because it recognizes something eerily familiar. Something too familiar. The movie didn’t feel like fiction at all. It felt like real life. Like my own story, and the stories of so many Black women I know, projected onto a giant screen without a buffer, without distance, without subtlety, and without permission.

That night, I posted a short, unfinished thought online: I’m feeling VERY weird… The movie felt deeply triggering. It mirrored my lived experiences too closely. I didn’t feel safe unpacking it publicly - not in this political climate, not with how quickly truth gets reversed, distorted, and weaponized.

So I sat with it.

And in that sitting, something important eventually shifted.

When Representation Feels Like a Wound

My first reaction to the movie was not generous. It was rejection. I genuinely couldn’t understand why so many Black people loved this film.

I clocked the optics immediately. The Black‑coded woman is green - literally marked as other, perceived by many as monstrous and frightening. Her birth circumstances and her mother’s story lean into the tired trope of Black female promiscuity. Her anger, though justified, is framed as dangerous, explosive, world‑ending - reinforcing the “Angry Black Woman” trope. Her mistakes are magnified while her strengths are minimized. Her presence is hypervisible and relentlessly scrutinized, while her humanity is oddly invisible.

Meanwhile, the white woman is portrayed as beautiful, adored, and assumed good. Her manipulation is reframed as charm. Her entitlement reads as confidence. Her harm arrives wrapped in smiles, bubbles, and plausible deniability.

I remember thinking, Are we really doing this again - in 2025?

Because Black women have spent generations fighting these exact narratives - in entertainment and media, in workplaces, in movements, in nonprofits, and in so‑called progressive spaces that swear they’re different.

At first, I thought Wicked was simply reinforcing stereotypes we already know too well.

And the discomfort didn’t fade.

It deepened.

But eventually, after the emotional fog lifted, a harder question surfaced:

What if the discomfort was the point?

Why This Movie Hit Me Now

A few days later, after sitting with the feeling instead of running from it, I realized something important.

If I had watched this movie twelve years ago, it probably would have felt like fantasy, and I would have enjoyed it.

But I am not the same person I was twelve years ago -  the version of me who still saw the world only through rose-colored glasses, before learning and lived experience taught me how things actually work.

In the last decade, as my understanding of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and anti‑racism deepened, I’ve also lived through workplace trauma, concerted gaslighting, coordinated retaliation campaigns, and the slow grief of realizing that many people who claimed allyship were never committed to justice - only to comfort, optics, and proximity to power.

So while watching Wicked, I wasn’t analyzing characters.

I was recognizing familiar patterns.

At one point, as I thought back to the opening scene - crowds celebrating the death of the “wicked witch” while glorifying Glinda - a question surfaced that startled me with its clarity: Is this how our stories end?

Literally or Symbolically.

As the “wicked” one. As the problem. As the person whose downfall is quietly celebrated while the architects of harm remain beloved and untouched.

That fear - of being misrepresented in perpetuity, of being misremembered - was new. And it mattered.

When Glinda Stops Being a Character

The moment everything clicked was almost casual.

Glinda sings, plainly, that it’s not about aptitude - it’s all about popularity and reputation.

That line isn’t filler. It’s a confession.

Suddenly, Glinda stopped being a character and became a system.

I recognized white womanhood not as individual intent, but as a technology of power - a structure that assigns innocence, controls narrative, delegates risk, extracts labor, and preserves hierarchy while insisting on its own goodness.

This is what psychologists call the halo effect. Black women call the damage it leaves behind - lived experience. 

White women are routinely assumed to be good even when they are causing harm in plain sight. Their tears are treated as evidence of innocence and vulnerability - even when they hold the institutional power to change the situation. Their intentions matter more than their impact. Accountability feels like cruelty to them. Healthy conflict gets reframed as abuse, while abuse of power is reframed as “misunderstanding,”,  “personality clash,” or ordinary conflict.

That assumed innocence makes white womanhood extraordinarily powerful.

And, yes, dangerous.

I’ve heard it said that white women are to Black women what the police are to Black men - and I agree, with one crucial distinction. In both cases, the power is socially sanctioned and rarely questioned - even after the damage is done.

In this context, however, the power is often exercised more subtly, and the violence is not always loud or immediate. It doesn't come crashing through the door announcing itself. 

The harm is insidious, occurring largely behind the scenes. It slips in quietly coded as concern; concealed by civility; hidden behind smiles, bubbles, and benevolence; and justified through procedure, policy and “good intentions.

It does not arrive in a uniform and a gun. It arrives in heels and a pen.

That subtlety is precisely what makes the harm harder to name, harder to interrupt, and easier to deny. 

Harmful systems don’t require everyone inside them to be malicious - they only require enough people to benefit from not noticing harm.

The Witch Hat and the Black Cape

There is a scene where Glinda gives Elphaba a witch hat, pretending it’s a gift.

She knows it will make Elphaba a spectacle. She knows how it will land. That same hat becomes the visual shorthand for Elphaba’s wickedness.

That’s when my body said, Oh. I know this part.

I call this the witch hat - the thing someone gives you that later becomes the justification for punishing you, or the symbol used to prove how “unfit”, “problematic” or “unprofessional” you supposedly are.

I’ve worn that hat before. More than once.

I’ve been encouraged to speak up, then disciplined for doing so by the very people who urged me to speak. Told leadership approved something, then punished for referencing it. Goaded into doing things framed as “the right way,” only to be retaliated against by the same people. Receiving so‑called favors that turned out to be traps in disguise.

The witch hat is how systems manufacture villains.

And then there’s the black cape.

The invisible labor. The courage. The work everyone knows is necessary, but no one wants to stand beside when it involves personal risk.

Elphaba fights for the animals. Sacrifices her own training for Glinda. Gives up her deepest desire for others’ liberation. And at the end, she’s given a cape and sent off alone to “go change the world.”

That moment cracked something open for me.

Because Black women are often treated like heroes.

And heroes, I’ve learned, are not meant to survive.

We are needed in crisis. Celebrated in theory. Abandoned in practice.

What My Brother Helped Me See

In a conversation with my brother about the movie, I finally named what had been sitting in my chest the entire time.

This wasn’t just about workplace harm or bad allyship. This was about collective legacy.

About the terror of giving your life to justice and being remembered as the villain anyway.

We talked about how Black women are expected to save everyone — movements, organizations, democracy itself — while receiving little to no protection in return. How we are revered as superheroes, yet denied rest, softness, or grace. Needed, but not loved. Seen, but not valued.

In the moments when solidarity matters most, we’re handed the black cape and cheered on to go save the world - or, at the very least, to save ourselves.

This is where the Strong Black Woman and Black Girl Magic tropes kick in. What are often framed as compliments become convenient excuses - justifications for withholding care, support, or intervention. After all, we’ve got this, right? We’re resilient. We’re strong. We’re magic.

There’s a saying many parents pass on to their kids: If you’re ever lost or in danger, look for a Black woman. Yet that same instinct exists alongside fear - the Black woman as protector and perceived threat, helper and suspect. Recently, in a grocery store, a white mother who had told her child to find a Black woman if they were ever in trouble or lost, called the police when she saw her child standing with a Black woman who was doing exactly that: trying to help.

This isn’t an anomaly. It’s a pattern.

That realization added a new layer to my understanding of Wicked: the danger isn’t only in how systems punish truth‑tellers. It’s in how they rewrite history to make that punishment feel justified.

The Wicked Truth

By the time I finished sitting with the movie - and moving through the initial pain - I realized something unexpected.

I loved it (though I've not had the courage to watch it again). 

Not because it was comfortable or perfect. But because it reflected the truth, or at least to an extent.

What if Wicked isn’t meant to reinforce these harmful dynamics, but to expose them?

To me, Wicked isn’t about a wicked woman. It’s about how systems - particularly white womanhood - manufacture villains, extract labor, and preserve power while calling itself good.

The risk, of course, is that some viewers will miss this entirely. That the story will be consumed as entertainment rather than critique. That individual redemption will be offered without any reckoning with the system that required a villain in the first place.

But for those of us who have lived this story, the mirror is unmistakable.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The danger of Wicked is not that it metaphorically shows these systems.

The danger is whether it interrogates them.

If Part Two redeems individuals without dismantling the structures that produced harm, it risks normalizing that harm.

I don’t yet know what Part Two holds. But I will be watching closely.

Food for Thought

What if the most dangerous villains aren’t the ones labeled “wicked,” but the ones who never have to wear the hat?

And what if the exhaustion you carry isn’t because you’re doing too much - but because you’re doing it alone, wearing the black cape you were handed?

Call to Action

I want to hear your stories.

Where were you handed a witch hat - something that later became the reason you were punished?

Where have you worn a black cape, doing work others benefited from but wouldn’t stand beside you when it carried personal risk?

Share them. Name them. Witness each other.

Because stories don’t just entertain or help us feel seen.

They either obscure the mechanisms of power — or they reveal them.

This essay is the first in a series analyzing the movie Wicked while exploring white womanhood, DEI, and the systems that reward optics while punishing truth and the transformation they claim to value. More to come.