  In “What Are We Worth?” Cooper provides a theoretical rendering of race prejudice, grounding it in sentiment and/or ideas. Cooper’s starting point for these reflections is a quote from Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) in which he asks, if Africa and Africans where to sink into the ocean “how much poorer would the world be?” and then posits that in the end “not a poem, not an invention, not a piece of art would be missed from the world”—suggesting that none of the above have been contributed to the world by Africa or Africans. From this starting point Cooper goes on to describe sentiment as “ephemeral”, “shifting”, and “unreliable”, and furthermore that “color prejudice or race prejudice is mere sentiment governed by the association of ideas” (VAJC, 162). Cooper surmises that when she hears expressions of dislike of the Negro for being “weak” such sentiments are an example of narrow-mindedness that is not worth engaging. She states, “Now this dislike it is useless to inveigh against and folly to rail at” (VAJC, 162).