The speaker of “We Wear the Mask” doesn’t describe a concrete setting. Instead, they speak only vaguely about the community to which they belong and alongside whose members they suffer. Aside from this community’s evident suffering, the only telling detail the speaker offers concerns this community’s Christian faith. The speaker reveals this faith at the beginning of the third stanza, when they reference the community’s prayers to Christ. That said, many denominations of Christianity understand earthly existence in terms of sin and suffering. The poem therefore seems interpretable as potentially referring to any Christian community. However, one additional detail makes such a broad reading less convincing. Throughout the poem, the speaker clearly indicates that their community stands apart from a larger “world” (lines 6 and 14) from whose gaze they must shield themselves. Thus, the community must be a minority group facing some kind of oppression. Furthermore, if we take the poet’s background into account, we can interpret the poem as specifically concerning African American communities in the period that followed the Civil War. This was a period when emancipated Black Americans struggled to establish themselves in a world where their newfound freedoms were still curtailed by pervasive racism and violence.