"Nothing natural can be wholly unworthy"
About this Quote
Cooper’s line reads like a calm rebuke delivered with perfect manners: if something is natural, you don’t get to dismiss it as trash. “Wholly unworthy” is the tell. She isn’t claiming nature is pure or that every instinct deserves applause; she’s arguing against the totalizing verdicts society loves to hand down on certain people and impulses. The sentence is built to puncture absolutes.
As an educator and Black feminist thinker writing in the wake of emancipation and during the rise of Jim Crow, Cooper lived inside a culture eager to label Black life, Black womanhood, and Black intellect as defective by definition. “Natural” had been weaponized on all sides: used to justify racial hierarchy (“it’s natural”) and also to pathologize those excluded from power (“it’s unnatural”). Cooper flips the frame. She insists that what emerges from human nature, and from lived experience, carries irreducible worth even when institutions refuse to recognize it.
The subtext is an argument for dignity without gatekeepers. By grounding worth in the “natural,” she sidesteps respectability’s trap - the demand that marginalized people must perform refinement to earn basic regard. It’s a quiet philosophical move with sharp political bite: if the root is legitimate, then the system calling it unworthy is the thing that should be on trial.
The line also doubles as a pedagogy. A teacher saying this is making room for curiosity, desire, anger, ambition - the unruly materials education tries to polish. Cooper’s wager is that you can cultivate excellence without first declaring someone’s humanity suspect.
As an educator and Black feminist thinker writing in the wake of emancipation and during the rise of Jim Crow, Cooper lived inside a culture eager to label Black life, Black womanhood, and Black intellect as defective by definition. “Natural” had been weaponized on all sides: used to justify racial hierarchy (“it’s natural”) and also to pathologize those excluded from power (“it’s unnatural”). Cooper flips the frame. She insists that what emerges from human nature, and from lived experience, carries irreducible worth even when institutions refuse to recognize it.
The subtext is an argument for dignity without gatekeepers. By grounding worth in the “natural,” she sidesteps respectability’s trap - the demand that marginalized people must perform refinement to earn basic regard. It’s a quiet philosophical move with sharp political bite: if the root is legitimate, then the system calling it unworthy is the thing that should be on trial.
The line also doubles as a pedagogy. A teacher saying this is making room for curiosity, desire, anger, ambition - the unruly materials education tries to polish. Cooper’s wager is that you can cultivate excellence without first declaring someone’s humanity suspect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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