Dunbar and Hughes, Essay Example

Paul Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” are poems in which fundamental social equalities are demonstrated and critiqued. Both authors utilize the form of poetry so as to both expose and radically question their particular cultural context, in an effort to demonstrate the overall inconsistency and hypocrisy of the dominant social discourse. As Hughes and Dunbar are poets representing the African-American experience, they are particularly attentive to issues of social injustice and how constructs of race are both created and perpetuated in the public imagination. Hughes and Dunbar are thus profoundly socially conscious poets, whose social consciousness takes the form of a critique of social injustice in the hopes of the improvement of a better world.

In the case of Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”, the African-American poet provides a striking contrast between skin color and the symbol of the mask. Writing from the black perspective, Dunbar provides the radical social thesis that such skin color is itself a mask. It is not a biological phenomenon, bestowed upon birth, but rather a social construct that has been introduced by a dominant social hegemony in order to classify and categorize the black population as somehow inferior to the white population. The view of the mask is the depiction of how African-Americans are seen from the perspective of the greater American ideology. The mask therefore hides the humanity of the African-American: “It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes.” (Dunbar) The eyes, as the common metaphor for the window to a human soul, are blocked from public view by the mask. Blacks are not presented in their humanity, but only according to their reduction to skin color. Yet by comparing skin color to a mask, Dunbar does not only portray the African-American experience, but also offers a positive critique, suggesting that such masks can be torn off. As Keeling notes in his analysis of Dunbar’s poem, “The mask has been lifted for the reader in this poem; our pathos is heightened.” (113) By chronicling the phenomenon of the mask, Dunbar does not only show how social discourse operates and assigns identities, but also gives a glimpse into how such identities may be overcome. The mask functions as a wholly exterior object that is added onto the human being, fundamentally transforming him or her to the gaze of the outside world: the human being becomes whatever mask is imposed upon him or her. At the same time, the metaphor of the mask means that the mask can always be lifted, so as to reveal a true nature. Such a discarding of the mask is the overcoming of the same social discourse that has imposed the mask. This is a difficult task, as Dunbar himself concedes. It is an appeal to God: “We smile, but oh Great Christ, our cries/To Thee from tortured souls arise.” The suffering that the mask creates is of such an extent, that it seems that only a transcendent power can ultimately remove it. But since Dunbar does present the phenomenon of racial discrimination in such metaphors, he at the same time makes clear, although it may be difficult, that the mask can be lifted through an inner strength: By comparing the mask to race, he shows how these racial classifications may one day be removed as easily as one removes a mask.

Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B” expresses the black feeling of marginalization from an entirely different perspective, yet with the same basic intent. The anonymous masked masses of Dunbar’s work are replaced by the anomaly of a black student amidst a dominant white population: “I am the only colored student in my class.” Yet Hughes is precisely concerned, much like Dunbar, with how the majority white population will view him. When discussing his work for school, he openly wonders: “So will my page be colored that I write?” Hughes expresses the suffocating environment of racism, a viewpoint that infiltrates every facet of his existence. Even his work, composed in the context of academia, a context that is supposedly without bias and prejudice, may potentially be affected by the viewpoint of the dominant social discourse. That he will not be judged as a student, but rather as an African-American student: this is Hughes concern throughout the poem. Yet such a concern ultimately leads him to understand the random nature of such racial classifications, and therefore, much like Dunbar, he questions their validity. “I like a pipe for a Christmas present/or records – Bessie, bop, or Bach.” Hughes’ reflection on his own subjective interests in these lines shows the inconsistencies of prejudice: Hughes is equally satisfied with listening to so-called African-American music, as he is content with listening to so-called European music. His own subjective complexity thus overturns the simplified and haste social prejudices that racist discourses project. By showing that he is an exception to this discourse, he concomitantly shows the limit of this discourse to explain the world. He thus unmasks the general falseness of this ideology, by revealing the blind-spots in its worldview. As Scott argues, the extent of this blindness lies in Hughes’ idea that black culture is crucial to American culture: “Hughes push this tension to its limits by rejecting blackness as a “minority discourse” and by advancing, simultaneously, the idea that black culture was actually the central line of all U.S: popular art and literature.” (Scott, 67) The idea that black culture is crucial to U.S. culture is a subversive idea, one that de-stabilizes the marginalization of blacks. Hence, in work such as “Theme for English B”, Hughes is continually involved in assessing and attacking boundaries. These social distinctions are artificial creations: exceptions to their apparent rule can always be produced. Hughes’ poetry can be viewed as the constant production of these exceptions, in order to show that the dominant social discourse rests on fragile foundations, and thus can be overcome at any moment.

Hughes and Dunbar’s criticism of the racist American ideology that they experienced as African-Americans strives to expose the fiction of this ideology. They provide radically new perspectives on issues of race and social division. At the same time, by presenting these ideologies as a fiction, they also offer a chance for the construction of a different form of community. By destabilizing preconceived “truths”, their poetry is the articulation of the possibility of a new truth, one grounded in a universal notion of humanity.

Works Cited

Dunbar, Paul. “We Wear the Masks.”
Hughes, Langston. “Theme for English B.”

Keeling, Jonathan. “Paul Dunbar and the Mask of Dialect.” In Harold Bloom (ed.) African American Poets: Phillis Wheatley Through Melvin B. Tolson. New York: Chelsea House, 2003. Pp. 113-128.

Scott, Jonathan. Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006.