We Wear the Mask (www.wcmt.org.uk)

We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties
Why should the world be otherwise?
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see thus, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

For me, Dunbar’s poem  is a metaphor for what I’m experiencing here in the US and the UK. The community doesn’t have the resources, the academy doesn’t have the solutions, and the public services don’t have the insights. Somehow the partnering of this trinity is supposedly the answer. The reality is far from the ideal of collective working for social and cultural change. The sheer weight and scale of the problems means that whoever controls the resources pushes the agenda forward. Dunbar mentions ‘We wear the mask that grin and lies’, a truism if ever there was one. When we are all looking for a justification for our ideas and validation of our thinking, we are all colluding with creating the illusion of real change.

As I look at the streets and observe the disparities between the races, the poor, the young, and so on, there are so many masks being worn, that it’s hard to see a unified position that we can all occupy and feel equal. How we prioritise need, determine who should get the benefits, or receive something to help solve a problem is so subjective and loaded against those who are powerless, disaffected, and at the margins of society. Dunbar talks about tortured souls. There are many tortured souls out there whose mask has fallen off and we can see who they really are. I have been humbled, felt inadequate, and have had to ask myself several deep searching questions about the morals and ethics about what we do as professionals, academics, and public servants. Engaging with disaffected people is not just about policy statements, focus groups, or trying to prove a hypothesis. It's about service, purpose, and assisting those in most need to feel someone cares.

Therefore, there is a need to question who is really wearing the mask.