Point of View

“We Wear the Mask” is written from a first-person plural point of view. The speakers maintain this perspective throughout the poem. This perspective coincides with the poem’s focus on the speakers’ metaphorical wearing of a mask. The mask, in addition to being what African Americans put on in response to a discriminatory world, also represents a sense of anonymity, in which individual, true identities have been rendered invisible. Therefore, the external world can only see the mask-wearers as an anonymous collective, a “We” in which everyone fades into the “mask the grins and lies” with little access to the “myriad subtleties” particular to each individual member of the collective (1-5).

While the speakers ultimately conclude that the mask is inhibitive towards cathartic self-expression, they also suggest the power of the collectivity that it and the associated use of “we” represent. For example, in the...