The Mask We Wear

500 Words2 Pages
Concealed Pain and Suffering The short poem “We Wear the Mask” is about oppressed black Americans forced to hide their pain and frustration behind a façade of happiness and contentment, written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and published in 1896. Prejudice was rampant in the late 19th century. So it was that many blacks wore a mask that suggested happiness and contentment but concealed their pain and suffering. Prejudice was the official policy in Dunbar’s lifetime, governmentally and otherwise, and whites vastly outnumbered blacks. Sometimes, blacks even withheld their true feelings from one another, for defeat and desperation were difficult to articulate, and could impose deep anxiety upon loved ones. So it was that many blacks wore a mask that suggested happiness and contentment but concealed acute distress and pain, “We wear the mask that grins and lies” (1). A person may appear one way on the outside but may be feeling the total opposite on the inside. He may be hiding his true feeling and emotions with a false appearance. Like the old saying you can’t judge a book by its cover and don’t judge a person until you have walked a mile in his or her shoes. The Civil War had liberated blacks from slavery, and federal laws had granted them the right to vote, the right to own property, and so on. “The debt we pay to human guile” (Dunbar 3) is a reference to slavery and the struggle of African-Americans. “Human guile” is the trickery, cunning, and deceit of those who enslaved them. Dunbar says this to be sarcastic and to point out the irony to the fact that they have paid their lives to people who had no interest in the well-being of the African-Americans, only in the leisure of their own. It is because while the struggle was hard, he knows somehow that it will come to an end and his people would flourish. The Supreme Court ruled in 1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson)
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