We Wear the Mask was written for Castle of Our Skins for the 2019 I AM A MAN Celebration, encapsulating the essence of the very famous civil rights declaration for human dignity. It was also my second gift to COOS as their composer-in-residence for the 2018-19 season. The piece highlights the very famous poem of Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask, in which Dunbar sheds light on the very painful act of having to pretend to have a very stable and jovial disposition in order to appease your oppressors. It refers to the many situations that black Americans and many other people of color must bear in order to survive in a society, that in many ways, has been constructed to neglect them.
