Masking

The term masking carries a multitude of meanings. One definition that hints at the sociopolitical import of the term is the act of covering the face or part of the face to conceal identity. The act of concealing one's identity from a dominating presence is perhaps the central function of this sort of masking. By necessity, it seems that races of people have had to obscure their identity, physically and otherwise, as acts of survival. The belief is that if one were to behave in a fashion that would accent one's personality/visage/culture, a dominating entity would compromise him or her.

African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar asserted that Black people in the United States would have to mask themselves to transcend the travails of their condition. In his most memorable work, “We Wear the Mask,” he asserted that, in the face of the dominant White culture and Jim Crow laws, Black people should veil their true identities, their hardships, for protective purposes. In his essay, “Paul Laurence Dunbar and Turn-into-the-20th-Century African American Dualism,” James Smethurst states that Dunbar believed masking served as a necessary function of survival, particularly for oppressed populations seeking to retain their senses of self. Smethurst wrote that Dunbar's split between “real” and “mask” remained the paradigm for African Americans from his era with its concern for representing an authentic self without being imprisoned by the actual or potential racism imparted by White readers.

Collectively, the African American community's quest for a holistic identity—in the face of the mid-Atlantic slave trade and the mandated oppression of Jim Crow laws, primarily—was the central theme of many early Black literary works, a journey fraught with conflict and questions. Perhaps no other writer better articulated this crisis of identity than W. E. B. Du Bois, when he famously coined the term double consciousness to describe the African American's dual and spiritually distant identifications: African and American. In his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois describes the fight African Americans endured to maintain identity. Du Bois suggests that African Americans grapple with the duality of their identity, being an American and a Negro, which he says are two opposing identities. The odyssey of the African American has been to filter these seemingly incongruous identities, while seeking viable manhood and striving to unify those conflicting ideals to become more realized in their humanity.

Critics have argued that Du Bois's concept is linked to a particular trope of African American literature, what scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. identified in his groundbreaking critical study, The Signifying Monkey. Gates links the Yoruba deity Esu-Elegbara with the African American Signifying Monkey, two Black, mythic trickster figures that influence Black vernacular and ultimately, the Black narrative. One form of signifying, Gates argues, is the use of parody in African American literature, which he refers to as “motivated signifying,” citing Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo, which parodies Western culture. Parody, which is [Page 436]defined as the act of imitating for purposes of ridicule and satire, is a form of masking. Literary critic Bernard Bell argues that although satire—employed by writers such as Rudolph Fisher, George Schuyler, and Wallace Thurman—was commonly used to articulate ethnic virtues and cultural truths, black satirists acted as moralists, revealing their truth from behind reality's mask.

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