The Mask

The mask is the main recurring symbol throughout the poem that represents the false face, the “grins and lies” an unjust world forces African Americans to put on as they confront racism (1). The poem initially shows the mask as imposed on the speakers by external legal and economic enforcement, a “debt we pay to human guile” (3). Dunbar also uses the mask to show how racism may be internalized by those who are marginalized when his speakers rhetorically ask, “Why should the world be over-wise / In counting all our tears and sighs?” – the mask creates protective anonymity that will “let them only see us” (6-8). In the final line of the poem, when the speakers repeat “We wear the mask!,” there is the sense that the mask is associated with a sense of urgency, and that the racism it represents must be dealt with in the...