The reader is introduced to a term coined and repeated by Pratt throughout the piece, "contact zones." She uses this term "to refer to social spaces in which cultures meet, clash and engage with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetric power relations, such as colonialism, slavery or their consequences as experienced in many parts of the world. the world today" (Pratt 584). Contact zones were not necessarily a positive interaction because these social interactions usually stemmed from ignorance and resulted in stubborn conflict. Dubois The Negro in the United States and Griffith's The Birth of the Nation and Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone are related through Pratt's contact zone terminology, autoethnographic texts, and ethnographic texts. These texts are written in different perspectives but address the contradictory topic of oppression of cultures or misinformation. Many dilemmas have been introduced in the past, but neither alone is correct because it constitutes a bias. You need to incorporate both perspectives of the story to get the real picture. Mary Louise Pratt discusses in The Arts of the Contact Zone, that rulers attempt to unify the world in the perspective of one person or group. He goes on to talk about how travel writing was simply based on the European perspective of the rest of the world and how they wanted to produce these essays under their own influence. One essay argues that travel writing “did not report Africa or South America; it produced places that could be thought of as sterile, empty, underdeveloped, unconscionable, in need of European influence and control, ready to serve European industrial, intellectual, and commercial interests” (Pratt 498). Europeans thought that having to civilize these places would be better than being slaves; at least animals are incapable of feeling emotions. Pratt explains how student Manuel felt his opinion had no value; the world was shown only from the teacher's point of view. However, should teachers feel as if it is their duty to “eliminate these things [discourse, parody, resistance, criticism] and unify the social world?” (509). Some people believe that unifying all perspectives into one idea is the best way for a community to get along. For example, teachers have their own language in the classroom; the “teacher-pupil language”. This particular language “tends to be described almost entirely from the perspective of the teacher and teaching, not from the perspective of pupils and pupils” (508). If teachers don't recognize something, it doesn't exist in the student's world.