Racism and Black Double-Consciousness
"We Wear the Mask" explores anti-Black racism and the double consciousness that Black people are forced to adopt in order to survive in a racist society. Dunbar uses the conceit of the mask to argue that the Black American experience is inseparable from racialized performance—the mask allows the masquerader to bear a fake "grin," "hides [their] cheeks and shades [their] eyes," and enables them to effectively conceal their pain, grief, and anger from unsympathetic white viewers. The duality of Black consciousness, between the unspeakable distress within and the external performances of contentment, is a response to trauma.
The mask as a medium for racial performance brings various historical subtexts into the poem. The image of a mask depicting a Black person's face evokes minstrelsy: a derogatory, offensive, and racist form of entertainment that was popular during Dunbar's time, in which white actors, mockingly, would wear blackface and perform Black caricatures. Minstrel shows would depict Black people as slow, lazy, and content even while being subjected to white violence and oppression. The masks in Dunbar's poem—like those of minstrel shows, which allowed audiences to fetishize Blackness and conveniently turn a blind eye to slavery, lynching, segregation, and other forms of institutional and interpersonal racism—signify a performance of fake contentment that suppresses long histories of Black suffering.
Trauma
Dunbar explores the theme of physical and psychological pain, through various images and sensory details. The heart of the masquerader is "torn and bleeding," and behind the mask, the masquerader sheds tears of agony. The "vile" clay and the "long mile" evoke images of slavery and black labor. The mask-wearers experience not only bodily pain, but also psychological trauma: the suppression of speech (i.e., they must "mouth a myriad subtleties"), ignorance and apathy ("let the world dream otherwise"), and perhaps also a sense of dysphoria from the performance of various conflicting identities.
How can one heal from physical and psychological trauma? While Dunbar does not present a clear-cut solution, he explores the various ways in which these experiences of trauma are expressed: One might seek solace in religion ("O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise"); one might use art as an outlet ("[w]e sing"). None of these mechanisms, however, fully resolve the masqueraders' pain. Dunbar critiques a bleak, apathetic, and violent society in which victims have no choice but to hide their trauma from their oppressors.
Community
One of the defining characteristics of this poem is the first person plural voice of its speakers—Dunbar describes a shared, communal experience through this distinct voice of the "We." The community of mask-wearers are together in their masquerade, supplication to Christ, treading of "vile" clay, and song.
Members of the "We" voice, narrating a shared experience, seem to empathize with one another. Yet it is this plural voice that also emphasizes the scale of violence committed upon this community by the rest of the world. It is not one individual, but a great mass of individuals, that suffer from the oppression of a brutally apathetic world. It is also unclear whether the many masqueraders are truly in communication with one another, since there is no dialogue among them: Are the members of the "We" community alone together?
