  In “The Ethics of the Negro Question” (1902) Cooper confronts the hypocrisy of Christianity in America. According to Cooper, the Negro “stands in the United States of America today as the passive and silent rebuke to the Nation’s Christianity, the great gulf between its professions and its practices, furnishing the chief ethical element in its politics, …[and pointing the finger at so-called] ideals of civilization” (VAJC, 206). This sentiment is reiterated in “The Negro in American Literature” where Cooper asserts that the color caste in this country is a “scathing rebuke to weak-eyed Christians who cannot read the golden rule across the color line” (VAJC, 145).