The Mask, By Paul Dunbar: Why Do People Wear The Mask

Decent Essays
Why do would people hide their true feelings behind a mask? Well, today in society, people wear “mask” for a variety of reasons, mainly to hide inner feelings and to conceal their true selves from the outside world. Every minute of each day there is someone wearing a mask to cover their true feelings. People wear mask every day left and right, just not the kind of mask we might think of. Mask are used not only as physical objects, but also to hide inner feeling. Mask and lies are just a part of an everyday lifestyle for some people to cover up their real issues. There are a numerous amount of times in life where people, including myself we are forced to do things we really don’t want but we do it anyway to avoid trouble. So we wear this mask to hide our emotions for showing on the outside serving as a purpose to keep peace but deep down inside it hurts the most. Wearing a mask only allows people on the outside to see what you want them to see. The poem by Paul Dunbar “We Wear The Mask” illustrates this theory .Paul Dunbar utilizes the mask as a metaphor to target a group of people in this case African Americans who placed a mask on to conceal their grief, sadness, and broken hearts. However, Dunbar was the son of freed slaves so this poem could have perhaps been from personal experience. Paul Dunbar first illustrates how the people in the poem wear mask the people meaning …show more content…
With cleverness being used as the main tool African Americans escaped their oppression using their cleverness. “Another aspect of the mask is the practice of storytelling. A white man himself, Harris knew what the white reader expected of black characters. Which was old slaves telling stories to his master’s children. But the Brer-Rabbit tales were really for slave children warning them of the dangers of Brer–fox (white man).” (The power of the wit and the mask Annie

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The short story that I decided to analyze is Ralph Ellison’s Battle Royal. This short story to me implied how in essence, we are not so different from our (black people) slave ancestors. A quote in the story where he says, “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.” This quote epitomized the whole short story for me.…

    • 1078 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In her article titled Slavery, Race, and Ideology in America, Barbara Fields asserts that race is a social construction rather than a physical attribute of individuals. In accordance with Fields, injustices have historically arisen when society tries to assign meaning to race. She asserts that dominant groups often use race to assert a presumed biological superiority in order perpetuate social hierarchy and justify oppression. Subsequently, racial meaning is consistently “verified” in social life to the point that it becomes palpable. These ideologies manifest themselves in their inclusion to the law, “which is bound by those rituals that daily create and recreate race in its characteristic American form.…

    • 2031 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Effects Of The Veil

    • 1427 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The Veil and its Horrors The Veil created many terrifying effects in the past years, especially on African Americans such as discrimination. African Americans feared the Veil as it damaged their family and segregated them from others. Du Bois felt the Veil separated Africans Americans and whites primarily hurting African Americans. As Du Bois grew up he noticed another side to the way people viewed him as a person.…

    • 1427 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Abuse is Never Acceptable Emotions and abuse play a big part in abuse. By putting on a false mask, the pain is hidden from prying eyes. The woman with the black eye for not having dinner ready when the man of the house arrived home. The child with the bruises because of the irritation to the parent because of a sleepless night. The woman down the block who can’t associate with the neighbors, who is locked in a prison by day.…

    • 1192 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    "Oh," thought I, "this is lucky", but even then felt the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I---alone" (DuBois 50). A veil is a piece of clothing that conceals the face, this relates to the suppression of the African Americans because whites think they understand the day-to-day life of being black or a slave. They think they know what it feels like to live black to black, but they cannot relate in any aspect. He was confronted with the existence of the veil when DuBois had dinner with a white men and he had to wait for…

    • 1186 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl in Ohio who faces great adversity as a result of her race, gender, and age. She wants nothing more than to have blue eyes, believing that they would make her beautiful and improve her quality of life. She lives in a small house with her mother, Pauline, her father, Cholly, and her brother, Sammy. In an excerpt titled “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator faces similar adversity as a result of his race. He is forced to fight in a Battle Royal against other African American men for the entertainment of a large group of white men after being invited to the event to give his graduation speech.…

    • 1251 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Author of the poem experience a racial prejudice which he explicitly addresses. He reflects how life was under the circumstances he was in. The speaker is excluded from the mainstream and dominant American society because of the color of his skin. He responded to the experience of exclusion by wearing what he called a mask. The advantage with his response by hiding his pain from society could end up disadvantaged by losing his true self.…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Ever since Invisible Man was published in 1952, readers and scholars have recognized its many oratorical components and also its interest in democracy. What we so far have missed, however, is the fact that what brings oratory and democracy together in the novel is the narrator’s relentless testing of rhetorical ethos and consubstantiality. In the novel’s inner frame, this testing takes place through embodied speeches that the narrator delivers to sizable audiences; in the outer frame, the testing occurs in the invisible man’s complete narrative address to his readers. Ellison was quite conscious of his narrator’s role as both speaker and author, noting in later essays and lectures that the young man undergoes “a transformation from ranter…

    • 2091 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    The resilience in the black community can be seen in their ability to grow, adapt, and evolve despite the brutal beginnings in chattel slavery. The end of slavery seemed to signify a new start for the Black community, but unfortunately the legacy of slavery still permeated the black experience. New forms of slavery and bondage that tired to leave the Black community in a perpetual state of silence continually emerged. From slavery to debt peonage to Jim Crow laws to mass incarceration, the black community has often had to use literature to first find their voice before challenging the sociopolitical structures that oppressed them. Due to social media and the more explicit forms of opposition that is seen through events such as protest, it…

    • 1570 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    The novel “The Spook Who Sat by The Door” written by Sam Greenlee is a satire of civil rights problems in the United States in the late 60s. This book is a direct image of violence, racism and suppression of the African American race in the United States. The novel itself is a revolutionary manual of how to beat the system and maintain the appearance of status quo. It is also a combination of hate, prejudice, passion and humor. These themes are evident in both the novel and in its 1973 film adaptation by Ivan Dixon.…

    • 1466 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One can tell that the mask is just simply a disguise. Then Dunbar says that the mask “shades our eyes”. One can be reminded of a saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul”. However, if the eyes are hidden and the face is completely covered one can not see how that person truly feels.…

    • 687 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In his 1977 essay, “In Defense of Masks”, Kenneth Gergen introduces the concept of multiple personas and personalities as being ‘masks’. In his psychological and sociological research, Gergen concludes that people do not have a coherent sense of identity and need masks to be happy, healthy, and successful in society. I agree with Gergen because different situations call for different personalities; such as acting professional for a job interview, being lively with friends, or maintaining a perfect image of yourself for other. Most jobs call for a certain degree of professionalism. People put on masks while at work to give off an impression of uniformity.…

    • 1016 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dubar uses mask to symbolize the hidden feelings felt by the black majority as a whole. By saying the “we wear…

    • 1403 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Racism In Huck Finn

    • 930 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 7 Works Cited

    For example, his cruelty against Huck functions as the perfect tool to exhibit the irrational idea that a person who “always whale [his son] when he was sober” (Twain 14) is considered better that a person of color. Twain continues his social argument through Pap’s racist speech, where Pap describes a black person able to vote as a “prowling, thieving, infernal…nigger”(Twain 28). These accusations only make Twain’s arguments more valid. He shows how the black man has everything a country could want in a citizen (Twain 28), but even then the country favors people as low as Pap.…

    • 930 Words
    • 4 Pages
    • 7 Works Cited
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout history, humans have isolated one another based on what they consider defining characteristics; Americans frequently treated one another poorly due to race. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man highlights the values of a culture or a society by using a character who is alienated from society because of his race. The narrator, or Invisible Man, feels as his name describes him, invisible, because he is African American and has been ignored, forgotten, disregarded, and overlooked throughout the novel. His white counterparts disregard his existence, worth, and humanity causing a sense of alienation to develop in the narrator. These isolating experiences the Invisible Man endures throughout his journey reveals the unjust morals of the novel’s…

    • 730 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays