Comparing We War The Mask And Tera Hunter's To Joy My Freedom

The words from Lizz Wright’s song Speak Your Heart perfectly captures the blatant and hidden messages in Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s We Wear the Mask and Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives After the Civil War. This essay will compare and contrast the similarities and differences in/from the two readings. This essay will also prove how the differences and likeness between the two readings are more than superficial actions acted purely out of reaction or emotion, but more so how they relate and were executed out of a deeper self-awareness and purpose from and outsiders view of the African American woman’s perspective. The end of the Civil War escorted in a time or a season of reconstruction. This period of time that lasted …show more content…
In his poem We Wear the Mask, Dunbar elegantly describes the hidden pain and strong front African Americans held and staged. His opening line “[w]e wear the mask that grins and lies” sets the point of view for any and all who know of the strife, hurt and misery African Americans had to endure and still having the ability to put up a front and smile. Throughout Dunbar’s poem he forcefully holds the struggles of ‘Black folk’ and the cloak they hold over it, never wavering from the main point, that African Americans struggled in …show more content…
Tera Hunter delves into how African American women and men deal with White systematic, judicial and social oppression and resistance to change. And, in regards to the nature of the environment, naturally there are obvious comparisons, when reading Dunbar’s poem, putting on a brave face in the mist of all the pain, fear and oblique dark future. The information in the Hunter conveys the brave face or mask so to speak, African American women and men put on through how they (African Americans) managed and transcended through the