Paul Laurence Dunbar We Wear The Mask

In the age of social media, the “masks” individuals wear online can be as deceiving as they are revealing. The issue of online authenticity and identity has become increasingly relevant in recent years, with online bullying, trolling, and misinformation becoming major concerns. The anonymity provided by social media can embolden people to leave a large digital footprint and do things they may not otherwise do in person, leading to a blurring of the line between online and offline behavior. Paul Laurence Dunbar in his poem "We Wear The Mask" uses ideas of deception, oppression, and peer pressure, which relates to a current issue involving cyberbullying and harassment.

Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem "We Wear The Mask" has remained a timeless work

The poem highlights the challenges of living in a society where one must conform to societal expectations to avoid discrimination or harassment. Dunbar uses literary techniques such as symbolism and metaphor to convey these themes present in his poem. One of the primary concepts in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s "We Wear The Mask" is deception through an object. Dunbar uses the mask as an extended metaphor to represent the facade that people put on to hide their true emotions. The mask, according to Dunbar, represents the smiles and laughs that people use to conceal their pain and suffering. Dunbar writes, "We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes" (1-2). The image of the mask is a powerful symbol of the deception that people engage in to fit in with society. Another topic featured in the poem "We Wear The Mask" is oppression. Dunbar writes about how society forces people to wear a

Bullying has been a long-standing issue among adolescents, and with the rise of social media, it has become even more prevalent. According to a study, being the victim of cyberbullying and having a tendency to engage in cyberbullying are “significant predictors of school violence in early adolescence” (Cho et al., 6). This suggests that bullying on social media can have serious consequences that extend beyond the online world. Other studies also similarly show how rampant cyberbullying/bullying is becoming: “The percentage of public schools reporting that students engaged in online bullying on or off campus at least once a week increased 4.1 percentage points between the 2009–10 and 2015–16 school years. At schools with at least 1,000 students, the increase was 8.1 points…In 2016, about one-third of middle and high school students between 12 and 17 years old said they had been cyberbullied” (Ladika