WE WEAR THE MASKS

Seminar Inspiration

By: Professor Dr. Vanessa Dianna Johnson

The We Wear the Mask honors studio was designed in 2021 when the then director of the Honors Program, Laurie Kramer, asked me to create a seminar based upon the freshman reading of the honors students of Yaa Gyasi’s book entitled Transcendent Kingdom. I believe that I was approached to do so because I used Gyasi’s previous work Homegoing as a required reading for students participating in the Dialogues of Civilizations to Ghana which I lead to explore Education and Learning in Summer 1 and Health Care, Health Systems, and Health Education in Summer 2.
Just as the Dialogues had afforded me, the Honors Studio allowed me to use what I believe is my unique capacity for infusing curriculum design, teaching, cultural engagement, and culturally nuanced service-learning to create courses grounded in theoretical frameworks of college student development and experiential learning.
After reading Transcendent Kingdom to prepare for the seminar I was inspired by the journey of its characters. The book was a story of a Ghanian family of three: father, mother, and infant son who left Ghana for the United States to find a better life; a typical immigrant to the US storyline. However, upon arriving in the US and attempting to find their way through success, the family evolved into one that was thrust into a life that was common to Black Americans in the US. Racism, poverty, people of color being appreciated only for athletic ability, etc. They eventually added a daughter to their family, who is the protagonist of the book. She was able to garner success in the US all the while experiencing her family’s pain and strife.

Because of their struggles, members of the family started experiencing mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, drug addiction, and hopelessness. The father eventually decides to go back to Ghana, but the mother refused to follow, in my opinion, due to being too proudful. The children feel abandoned as they did not know that it was their mother who choose for them not to also return to Ghana. There are parts in the story were the protagonist, Gifty, is sent back to Ghana to visit relatives. It is there that she witnesses a naked person begging for food that her aunt points out is “crazy.” This scene is not uncommon, even in today’s Ghana.

From reading the story of Transcendent Kingdom and thinking deeply about the characters in the book and my understanding of Ghana, I began to realize that the family left behind a country that used masks for celebratory reasons. A country that is known for its jovial people, coming to a country where one suffers as a Black person and pretends that everything is fine, and especially where one is not supposed to call out racism and inequality.
From this realization, I began to think about the poem of Paul Laurence Dunbar “We Wear the Masks” written a decade after the Civil War in 1895. In this poem, Dunbar talks about how with all of the racial strife and discrimination that continued even though slaves were freed, Blacks wore metaphorical masks to hide their suffering from the world.  With the story of Transcendent Kingdom and the commentary of Dunbar’s poem, the mask became the metaphor that linked for me Ghanaians’ and Black Americans mental health concerns.

I have often used Dunbar’s poem to have my students discuss the other affinity groups in America that wear masks: women, LGBTQIA+, Native Americas, Latinx, Asian Americans, Immigrants, and the poor. This year, Fall 2022, in attempting to provide a reiteration of the mask project, I could not ignore the mask metaphor that is present in this day and time. I suggest that Americans are now wearing a collective Mask of Democracy. That is, that we are pretending to be proud of our democracy as a whole to the world, but in reality, we do not recognize that the Mask of Democracy is just a pretense, as the pillars of democracy have been under assault.  A democracy that we thought had been permanently legislated and now built into the very fiber of our being.  Instead, we are fighting legislation that over 50 years ago was resolved. Our Mask of Democracy hides attempts to bring from the cemetery of dead oppressive ideologies, to renewed negation of civil rights, in the form of reconstituted notions of women’s rights, restrictive voter access, denial of LGBTQIA+ rights, censorship in providing a comprehensive and factual American history in schools, and the continual lack of school resource equality, health care access, and reduction of government assistance for the poor.

Having these dusted off and renewed oppressive ideologies trigger mental health conditions for some who have experienced these inequalities in the past, as well as those who are younger and more recently exposed to these assaults on democracy, having felt that the rights of equality in many areas had at least been legislated.  These more current destructive efforts against civil rights have only heightened mental health concerns and the need for the wearing of masks to disguise marginalized peoples’ pain.  

The opinion in this statement is soley that of Dr. Johnson