Paul Laurence Dunbar published “We Wear the Mask,” one of his most celebrated poems to this day, in 1895 as part of his second collection of verse, titled Majors and Minors.
A publication that contributed to the publicity of Majors and Minors, as well as Dunbar's famed career, was William Dean Howells's review of the book in the June 27, 1896 issue of Harper’s Weekly (then the most widely read literary journal in America). Howells wrote that in Dunbar he saw "white thinking and white feeling in a black man,” and that he most enjoyed Dunbar's dialect poetry because of its humor.
"We Wear the Mask" is not a dialect poem, but one of the standard English poems in the collection. The poem's formal, tonal, and linguistic contrast with the other "Humor and Dialect" poems in the collection demonstrates Dunbar's versatility as a poet. The poem, on one hand, speaks of the Black double-consciousness and racial performance in a white-dominant society; on the other, it also lyricizes about the universal experience of performed identities and the rift between persona and self.
