Analysis Of We Wear The Mask

Abraham Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” ensured freedom and a hope for a better life to the African American community. Three decades later, the idea of a better life had been forgotten. Instead, the Black Americans had begun to endure their suffering, pretending that the unfair laws created by the White Americans were fair. Paul Dunbar describes in his poem, “We Wear the Mask,” the roles that African Americans began to play in life in order to survive. In his poem, you are able to understand the pain, fear, and hope that comes with the “mask” they wear.
In sociology, a human is socialized by the environment that is around them. The norms of a society affect the people living in it (Conley, 2013). During the time of slavery, people were socialized to believe that it was okay to treat humans like animals, it was a social norm. When the 13th Amendment was created in 1865, social change struck society, but not many people were willing to participate in this change. This resistance to change caused the White community to target the African Americans in anger. Dunbar writes, “This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” (Dunbar), to describe the suffering that the African Americans felt but had to pretend didn’t exist. Lynching, house burnings, and the Ku Klux Klan, all attacked and tortured the …show more content…
This mask is a front that the African Americans had to put up to the cruel world around them. This time of persecution, hate crimes, racism, the KKK, lynching, and other forms of prejudices, were a result of a social change that no one wanted to support. Even though slavery had ended with the 13th Amendment, African Americans were still slaves, although they weren’t attached to shackles anymore, they were attached to the