“We Wear the Mask” contains no explicit reference to an external setting in which the action of the poem takes place. Rather, the setting of the poem is more intangible, focused on the mental landscape of the speakers as they navigate the intricacies of a masked existence, put on in confrontation with a harshly discriminatory world. As Dunbar was writing during the Reconstruction era of American history, critics generally assume that "We Wear the Mask" confronts the Black experience in a particularly fraught and uncertain time.

Additionally, there is movement from outside to inside to back outside the experience of the inner life – the first stanza is about the “debt” forced onto an entire racial group, the second is about how the members of the racial group internalize the “debt” of the mask forced onto them, and the poem ends with the speaker’s resolve to...