“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is a lyric poem describing the symbolic mask worn by black Americans to conceal their deep misery and pain in the face of racial discrimination and to psychological torment. in the years following the Civil War. The general impression that the reader has is that of a gloomy commentary which delivers a sad reality. The problem lies in the fact that black Americans do not wish to expose their suffering and are therefore forced to use the mask to make the world believe that they are happy and satisfied. It's purely a survival tactic. For Black Americans to assimilate into the society that caused them and their ancestors suffering, they feel the need to wear a mask that allows them to express, at least superficially, their gratitude for have 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 conceal by hiding emotions behind a facade of smiles and grimaces. The mask, in essence, becomes a symbol of both weakness and strength. At first, the mask hides the truth. Its bearer hides behind a false barrier. The mask is an outer covering that black people adopt so that their true feelings are not exposed. Interestingly, towards the end of the poem, the mask changes from something that hides emotion to something that essentially keeps the persecutors away. With the mask in place, the oppressors cannot detect how much their contempt and agony affects the victim. The mask, being the middle of the paper, the true identity is hinted at in chapter 1 when the narrator's grandfather, a former slave, calls on the narrator's father to defeat the whites "with yeses, undermine them with smiles, grant them to death and destruction” (16). The grandfather suggests that on the surface one must live the life of a cooperative “outsider” and internally preserve one's animosity and resentment toward the aggressor. Much like in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, 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 the struggles of black men to enter white society after their emancipation. Interestingly, the poet never once mentions slavery or racial discrimination in his work, suggesting that the poem itself "wears" a mask..