“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is a lyric poem describing the symbolic mask worn by black Americans to cover their deep misery and pain as they face racial discrimination and the psychological torment in the years following the Civil War. The general impression the reader gets from it is that of a gloomy comment that conveys a sad reality. The difficulty lies in the fact that black Americans do not want to expose their suffering, and therefore are forced to use the mask as a way to make the world believe that they are content and satisfied. This is purely a survival tactic. In order for Black Americans to integrate into the society that caused them and their ancestors pain, they feel the need to wear a mask that allows them to express, at least superficially, their gratitude for having been kept alive. In this fifteen line poem, Dunbar expresses his anger at having to hide his emotions. When black Americans were beaten, lynched, and discriminated against, they were forced to absorb it and mask their true emotions with a smile. Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of freed slaves, goes on to highlight the severity of the pain and suffering that these masks hide by concealing emotions behind a facade of smiles and smiles. The mask, in essence, becomes a symbol of both weakness and strength. At first the mask hides the truth. The wearer hides behind a false barrier. The mask is an external shell that black people adopt to avoid exposing their true feelings. Interestingly, towards the end of the poem, the mask transforms from something that hides emotions to something that essentially wards off persecutors. With the mask in place, the oppressors cannot detect how their contempt and agony affect the victim. The mask, being the... center of the card... of true identity is spoken of in Chapter 1 when the narrator's grandfather, a former slave, invites the narrator's father to overcome the “with yeses, weaken them with smiles, accept them until to death and destruction” (16). Grandfather suggests that on the surface one should live the life of a cooperative “outsider” and internally preserve one's animosity and resentment towards the perpetrator. Just as in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the use of masks as an object of deception becomes a form of defense while others violently attack the individual's self-esteem. Dunbar's eloquent poem “We Wear the Mask” is a beautiful interpretation of black men's struggles to enter white society after their emancipation. Interestingly, the poet never mentions slavery or racial discrimination in his work, leading one to believe that the poem itself "wears" a mask..