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I see Anna Julia Cooper as being a phenomenal race theorist. In A Voice From the South, Cooper proposes two types of authors in general—without race being a factor:

1. "[T]hose in whom the artistic or poetic instinct is uppermost" (Cooper 380) (art for the sake of art).
2. "All those writers with a purpose or a lesson" (Cooper 381) (referring to writers that act to push an ideal upon their audience—intended to persuade an audience in a certain direction about something).

She goes on to apply the second author type to authors that "have . . . attempted a portrayal of life and customs among the darker race" (Cooper 381).

She is arguing that a portrayal of a black person that has some sort of objective is a distorted image of a black person—that a true image of a person can only come from that person's expression for expression's sake ("artists for art's sake" (Cooper 382)). This means that an artist's intention should not be to force an idea on people, but to freely express his/herself. Cooper goes on:

"I am brought to the conclusion that an authentic portrait, at once aesthetic and true to life, presenting the black man as a free American citizen, not the humble slave of Uncle Tom's Cabin—but the man, divinely struggling and aspiring yet tragically warped and distorted by the adverse winds of circumstance, has not yet been painted." (Cooper 382)

I believe that, here, Cooper is saying that the image of the black slave should be replaced by the image of the black person's new struggle, which should be analogous to any person's struggle. This does not mean that every person's struggle is the same, but it does mean that all people are equal in the fact that they are, first and foremost, people, and secondly, that they are able to experience life. Before I digress from Cooper's statement too much, however, I must note that she is talking specifically about the integration of black people into the world of art, which would involve the freeing of the black person from the "cage" of racial discrimination, giving him/her the ability to express being human—without the "wires of [his/her] cage . . . pricking and cramping [him/her] at every heart beat" (Cooper 383).

Work Cited:

Cooper, Anna Julia. "Excerpts from A Voice From the South" (1892). Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Anne E. Boyd. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2009. 379-384.