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Racism And Sexism

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Essay paper assignment II “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” This quote is largely a summarization of one of the core themes of the book, namely the inability to tell truly important things about something, a person for example, by just their looks. When the eye alone is used, it leads to a false or incomplete version of a person, the appearance but not the substance. The opposite of this quote, using appearance as a metric to determine the worth of a person, is the core drive behind racism and sexism, and one of the drives behind ethnocentric thought. Using appearance is a simple, but wholly incomplete vision of what a person really is; it ignores their life, experiences, beliefs, drives, and character. …show more content…

This links to the talk of "taming" that the book uses, establishing ties that is. When ties are established, then you can see what is invisible to the eye. That tie could be as simple as a friendship between two people or an understanding between two cultures. The Little Prince demonstrates this concept several times. The Lamplighter is an example of this concept, a man of great duty but not great prestige or position. The scientific council, however, rejects the Turkish astronomer's findings on the basis of ethnocentric sight, not merit. Additionally, this quote can be framed in terms of etic and emic thought. Etic thought is very much-so sight based. It focuses on observations and similarities it can draw between observations. Thus, emic study in contrast, tries to look past conventions that look odd at sight and understand the innerworkings of something. It tries to not just make judgements, but make thoughtful and more accurate tellings of why and how something, someone, someplace,

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