Should Wearing Wear A Mask?

The poem We Wear the Masks by Paul Dunbar is an example of how people hide their feelings due to what others think of them. Like in the book To Kill a Mockingbird, the colored people in town are stereotyped due to their color and looks. The poem states, “We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes” (Dunbar). When people are stereotyped they hide their feelings to make others happy. Wearing the mask is a symbol of how people cover themselves to get away from their feelings.

When something consumes you such as a society and tells you what you have to be, how do you avoid the mask? The poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Dunbar and the novel “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury both use a mask as a symbol. The mask symbolizes how closed off people are, and how they hide themselves and their emotions from society. These “masks” are worn to protect yourself from the cruel and treacherous society that has been created. The new society has taught people how to cover up their true emotions with these fake smiles and shining eyes.

put a mask on his face; a mask is more easily killed and forgotten” (Weisel 192).

The people we see every day are not always who they appear to be. Our family, friends, peers, work associates, and even our own self’s change who we are sometimes to cope or to seem better off than we are. We put on “Mask” to show the person we want to be seen as and often times people wear more than just one. In Flannery O’ Connor’s, “Good Country People” many of her main characters wore mask. They each had their own reasons that they chose to conceal their real identity. Nevertheless, the characters in O’Connor’s short story wanted to hide their true persona’s or deceive other people. Sometimes it was merely done to cope with their tragic pain and in other cases it was done to deliberately take advantage

Determined to find exactly what altered masks can do to an identity, an experiment involving 18 female college students and a clinical trainee was conducted. Gergen’s intentions were to “find the factors of an individual’s choice

First, I’d like to express my example of how covering is prevalent. I have a friend who’s been a closeted homosexual for many years now. Because he grew up in a family whose beliefs weren’t supportive of LGBTQIA+ rights, he was left to pretend he was heterosexual, in fear of being belittled and possibly neglected by his family. My friend’s display of “acting heterosexual” ties in to Yoshino’s example of a “True” and “False” Self in psychology, and how “the False Self protects the True Self…”

“Like circus performers, we smear on makeup to become someone else. Far beyond applying a little lip gloss or hair dye, our mask attempts to cover up who we really are. Our mask attempts to cover up who we really are […] what we’ve been through, what we know to be important, and what we are afraid to share with others”. (O’Leary, 36) John O’Leary focuses heavily on the concept of taking off our masks in his inspirational book, On Fire: The 7 Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life. What O’Leary means by this analogy is that we should all break the barriers which we have erected to protect ourselves from the world, walls that were built after being hurt, experiencing something traumatic, or perhaps after being betrayed. However, such walls oftentimes do not benefit ourselves in the way that we may wish. Instead, more often than not, our masks do the opposite, and they isolate us from what we as humans need most: friendship, companionship, and love.

Equality’s Mask A mask is something that covers all or part of the face, worn to hide one's identity. A mask can also be defined as anything that disguises or conceals a person or an object. People often use masks because they do not want others to think poorly of them.

Barrier studies show that stigma is the fourth highest barrier to seeking help (Clement et al, 2014) proving why it is fundamental to research stigma.

Stigma is something most people can relate to. It is the feeling of unacceptance and disapproval. Goffman’s theory of social stigma describes stigma as “an attribute, behavior, or reputation that is socially discrediting”. Stigma impacts those who are seen as deviant in many ways, they may have to change the way the express themselves in public and even in private. In a world where diversity is a common goal there is much stigma attached to those who do not support it. A group against the social norm of racial diversity, is in other words, deviant! Pete Simi and Robert Futrell’s article, “Negotiating White Power Activist Stigma”, discusses a groups way of avoiding stigma through concealment. A specific group comes to mind when one thinks of white supremacist, “one of the most radical, deviant, and stigmatized social movements- The U.S. white power movement (WPN)” (Futrell and Simi).

on people’s mental and physical health in a variety of populations, as well as their fight for survival in the wild (e.g., the effect of racism on

masks. All the mask that one possesses changes their behavior and in turn, adds to their

to believe the mask wearing is anything other than a burden, a dark shadow in a supposedly free society.

In today’s modern society, we are held accountable for the way we get our point across to others. We are taught to follow guidelines and rules in any given environment communicating with other people. Communicating professionally or properly to some may be problematic because everyone has their own unique way of doing so. Throwing on an “identity mask” and pretending to be proficient is a crutch some people lean on to get by. In our modern society and communities today, if the guidelines on how to properly communicate with others are disregarded, it is considered unruly. In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s essay, “The Evolving Self,” we are taught about creating the ideal self. He describes that throughout time the self is built through a series of hardships, yearnings, dedication to creating a better future, and communication. Physical objects along with unique qualities and characteristics have been turned into symbols that are associated with power or status. They are heavily desired in society, and the brain “follows that what we pay attention to over time” (217). Interactions with others who have the endowments we do not pose an internal threat to us in our minds. Qualities that we don’t see in ourselves are automatically noted in our brain, and we tell ourselves we will face demons in order to gain what we don’t have. Barbara Mellix in, “From Outside, In” had to face her demons in order to realize her true worth and self she wanted to build. Through most of her life, she

Seheff (1984) upheld this view by suggesting that stigmatising a person will often mean that a retrospective labelling takes place via the interpretation of someone’s past being consistent with their present and future self.