We Wear The Mask Dunbar Analysis

Through the various works of historic Black Intellectual Jeremiads and modern civil rights activists, one can understand that Black individuals in America have and continue to be subjected to positions of unfreedom. This social fact— evoked by the oppressor’s (whites) need to keep the oppressed (Blacks) ignorant, thereby disenfranchised and incapacitated— problematizes notions introduced by James Baldwin when he states, “we cannot be free until they are also free.” Though Baldwin’s optimistic intentions of American unity as the result of black and white solidarity seemingly revokes Black agency in our own liberation and leaves us permanently doomed to white recognition of their own immorality, he is correct to an extent. This is because systemic

Paul Laurence Dunbar uses conflict in “we wear the mask” to get his point across about African Americans being treated unfairly after slavery ended. He talks about how Africans Americans being happy because slavery ended but they still wasn't being treated like everyone else. Paul uses conflict by arguing that the life of African Americans are still being treated unfairly after slavery was over. Paul uses the quote “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise.” which means that African Americans are happy slavery over but they are still sad that they still get treated unfairly. In conclusion that African Americans should be treated like everyone else, they are just like us and should be treated like us.

Masks hide the truth and obscure the facts. They form a barrier between what is real and what is an illusion. Yet, during from the moment blacks were brought to this continent in chains, to the moment they were granted civil rights in the 1960’s, masks were a method of survival. Another way of life for African Americans was the practice of signifying. Signifying is mostly seen in the black literary tradition as a means for African Americans to take back power from the white through misinformation and deception. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, masking, and signifying serve as methods of survival for the narrator, as well as ways for malicious outsiders to take advantage of the narrator.

During the years following emancipation, black people could choose to live “behind the veil,” viewing their newfound freedom as a blessing, or they could live

Some people in high school are pretending to be at a big masquerade party. They wear masks pretending to be someone different from who they really are, and convince the people around them to see there mask as their true self. Many of the teenagers in the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes wore masks to hide who they really were. The students revealed their true identities and how they felt by writing and performing poetry on Open Mike Fridays in their English class. The main character, Tyrone Bittings, is a judgmental, confident, observant teen that reveals who he truly is through learning and listening to poetry.

Have you ever had a day when you are too embarrassed of yourself that you wanted to hide by wearing a mask? Masks are used in various ways, they can be used for a Halloween costume or a stage play. The astonishing thing is that those masks are visible to others. In the Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the characters such as Myrtle Wilson, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan use masks that cannot be seen with the naked eye, they used them as a way to hide their flaws to others.

Born February 23rd 1868 DuBois spent his life caught between two extremely unsettling times in the history of African-American culture. Living in the time after slavery but before the boom of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s Debois situated himself in such way that he was able to bring awareness about the unique experience felt by many African Americans during this time period.As an African American writer Sociologist, Civil Right Activist and a Pan -Africanist Dubois communicates the reality of his and his people’s struggle in the his paper Double-Consciousness and the Veil. He argues that “ there is a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others”(Dubois,1903,pp.164). Defining what he would essentially coin as the powerlessness felt by many African Americans when they must decide subjectively and objectively weather to be African or American in a given situation. He prefaces this by asking the question what does it mean to

As I read, Paul L. Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” I was interested in how he described what a mask represents. It is true that a mask was used to hide a person’s pain, emotion, or mood before the day known as Halloween developed. I love how Paul refers the use of the masks as a black or white person’s escape from other peoples’ worried faces. No one can ever understand what someone else is going through. People can never truly speak their truth or let out their suffering. Paul being one of few African Americans to speak his truths on the events he witnessed wrote this poem to show that no one should hide their thoughts or opinions behind a fake face or facial expression. The poem is like a fake speech on how the masks cannot shade your struggle.

The novel To Kill A Mockingbird exposes the reality behind the mask that people wear to protect themselves from ideas and thoughts that they have but don’t want to accept because they are scared to be vulnerable to society and possibly themselves.

The Harlem Renaissance was a period in American history, which occurred in the 1920s in Harlem, New York. The cultural movement was an opportunity for African Americans to celebrate their heritage through intellectual and artistic works. Langston Hughes, a famous poet, was a product of the Harlem Renaissance. One notable piece of literature by Hughes is “Dream Deferred”. However, the discussion of African American culture isn’t limited to the 1920s. Paul Laurence Dunbar showed the potential struggles of being African American in his poem “We Wear the Mask”, written fifty-five years prior to “Dream Deferred”. Both poems share similar tones and themes. “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes can serve as a sequel to “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar through displaying a cause and effect relationship which highlights the strength of neglect and disguises.

Throughout life people struggle to find their true self, and following social order. In the novel The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn the characters Jim and Huck have an issue with following social order and struggling to survive on the run to freedom. With similarity from other sources such as the movie Catch me If You Can and the poem “We wear the Mask”. These sources all share similarity to Mark Twain’s novel. Throughout The Adventures of Huckleberry finn, Catch Me If you can, and “We wear the Mask” shows the relationship and similarity between the following sources through Huck and Jim having similar characteristics.

In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears. “Grins and lies,” refers to how the mask functions, the mask smiles, showing happiness even when it is a fake and a lie. While describing how it feels to wear the mask, the speaker says, “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” (4). He says this to show that on the inside they are suffering greatly, but they disguise themselves as smiling to show that nothing is wrong. This shows how the author feels while wearing his “mask,” and demonstrates to the reader how the speaker feels it is necessary to put up

The poem I chose to analyze is We Wear the Mask, written by Paul Lawrence Dunbar in 1896. Its theme is about hiding our true feelings and emotions, and lying about who we are. When looking at Dunbar’s life history, and the political context at the time, we understand that he efficiently uses this theme in order to talk about how black people have to hide how they feel about their social status and the treatment they receive from white people. He conveys the theme to the audience thanks to a clever word choice. Indeed, he talks about “grin” and “smile”, using facial expressions as a description of the mask (Dunbar, lines 1 & 4). We realize he’s talking about the mask, and not the real emotions of the person, thanks to a contrast between negative

Many people in the world today try to cover up their darker sides with a "mask" which hides their true self. Often times, however, people's masks are removed and we see them for who they really are. Many politicians today do this when they try to get people to vote for them. They wear a "mask" to veil their darker sides so the public can't see their flaws. The narrator in "The Black Cat" by Edgar Allen Poe and the character Tom Walker in "The Devil and Tom Walker" by Washington Irving wear "masks" to cover up their darker character traits. However, eventually we are exposed to who they really are. Regardless of how hard one tries to conceal their darker traits and motives, the truth always comes out in the end.

Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African-American poets to receive widespread recognition from both the Caucasian and African-American communities released many pieces of literature expressing his feelings throughout his life during the Reconstruction era. Two of these pieces, “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy” were short poems that veered from his regular dialectic pieces, aimed at aiding in Reconstruction, and held hidden rebellions against the mistreatment of African-Americans at the time the passages were released. The African-American and Ethnic Literary Studies critical approach is a tool used while critiquing pieces of literature that hold common themes or elements tracing back to slavery and segregation in early America. This approach