Text and Summary of We Wear the Mask

“We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar is about African Americans. The poem highlights the human tendency to hide our true feelings and thoughts from those around us by putting up a facade what T.S. Eliot calls “the face to meet the faces that you meet” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Have you ever falsely answered “good” or “well” to someone who asked you how you were doing? In the poem, the speaker calls that facade a “mask.”