The right to reflect
She fought for the right to ask questions and made space for those never meant to be heard.
Before she had a degree, a platform, or a vote, Anna Julia Cooper had a question: Why not me? She didn’t just demand to be heard. She redefined what it meant to think out loud.
And in doing so, she named something we still haven’t fixed…in design, in education, and now in AI.
I’m Nate Sowder, and this is Unquoted, installment three.
Edited by Pat Hoffmann.
When Anna Julia Cooper was nine years old, she was admitted to a new school for freed Black children in North Carolina. The boys were taught Greek, but the girls were not.
When Anna asked why, the answer was simple: Girls didn’t need Greek.
After she asked again (maybe more than once) they made an exception, but that wouldn’t be the last time Cooper had to ask a system to recognize her.
Born in 1858 to an enslaved mother, Cooper entered the world with no legal rights and no claim to formal opportunity. What she had instead were questions. Questions about knowledge, about dignity, about why some voices were treated with a welcome ear and others as interruption.
She became one of the first Black women in the U.S. to earn a doctorate.
But her legacy isn’t about academic achievement. It’s about what she revealed underneath that system.
Most remember Cooper as someone who fought for access. And she did. To schools, books and to degrees.
But that’s not what this article is about.
This article is about a deeper question.
What kind of thinking is possible when you’re never expected to think out loud?
She saw something most people miss: that intelligence isn’t just about having information. It’s about having the space to stop, ask, reflect… and more importantly, be taken seriously.
For many people, that space had never existed.
The woman who wasn’t supposed to think out loud
By the time she was a teenager, she was translating Latin, correcting teachers and questioning why girls were given sewing needles instead of books.
From what I can tell, she wasn’t a prodigy. She was just paying attention — which makes all this even better.
In 1892, with the Aldine Printing House in Xenia, Ohio (which happens to be the town in which I currently live), she published A Voice from the South. This book was one of the earliest, most urgent works of Black feminist thought. She wasn’t writing about identity to describe herself. She was writing to expose the structures that shaped how identity was used: who got to have one, and who got reduced to a category.
And she was doing it long before anyone called it a theory.
“Not the mere passive reflection of others’ thought, but the power to form and express one’s own.”
That was the goal.
Not just access to the answers that already existed, but the right to ask new questions and be taken seriously.
Cooper wasn’t writing to be seen. She was writing to be heard…on her own terms.
What she understood
Cooper saw that exclusion wasn’t just about physical access to schools or resources. Exclusion included what people were allowed to think once they got there.
She lived in a world where some people were expected to lead, and others were expected to follow. Some were taught to ask questions while others were taught not to.
When you silence generations, then point to that silence as evidence of lesser minds, that’s called oppression. Cooper saw the truth behind that logic and refused to let it stand.
She knew the system wasn’t measuring intelligence… it was shaping it.
And it was shaped by whether your voice was welcomed, your curiosity encouraged, and your questions taken seriously.
“It is not the ignorant and vicious that make the most noise about education… it is those who feel its necessity.”
I’ve read that quote over and over, and Cooper felt it — deeply.
Today, we use terms like “inclusive design,” “participatory research,” and “reflective practice” as if they’re modern inventions, but Cooper was doing all of it without the vocabulary and without any sort of permission.
Her questions didn’t come from theory. They came from experiences that were hard-earned and overlooked. She challenged the assumption that only certain kinds of knowledge counted, and she fought for people whose insights and realities were never seen as part of the record.
Anna Cooper wasn’t trying to join the conversation. She was challenging who decided what counted as knowledge in the first place.
She knew where this was going
Cooper had every right to make a point, get mad, and walk away. She could have withdrawn from the system that denied her an education, autonomy and a right to speak freely.
But she didn’t.
What makes her remarkable is that she allowed her persistent nature to become precision as a method for executing change.
She saw that power shaped knowledge, and that shaping happened through permission. And yet, for all that clarity, Cooper didn’t become cynical. Once she made it through the door, she didn’t shut it behind her. She built a structure for reflection that didn’t depend on privilege or permission.
She wrote, taught, and lived in a way that made room for people to ask questions… even when they weren’t being asked to.
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.”
Cooper never saw tools like artificial intelligence, but she would have recognized the challenges they presented. Today, we have systems that retrieve information, summarize arguments and simulate conversation. We say they support reflection… and they can.
But reflection only happens when people are encouraged to pause… ask questions… and think out loud.
Not everyone is taught to do that.
The same is true in design. User research may promise to center around real people, but Cooper would ask: Which people? Which questions? Which experiences are being taken seriously, and which ones are still treated as noise?
She wouldn’t reject the tools we have. She would push them further to be more reflective of the world as it is, and more capable of helping people imagine something better.
She knew that silence isn’t always a result of a lack of interest. Often, it comes from being told (again and again) that your questions aren’t worth asking.
Anna Cooper left us with the clearest possible response:
Ask anyway.
What we build next
If Cooper were alive today, she wouldn’t be designing AI tools. She’d be asking better questions about what they allow.
She would want to know who still doesn’t see themselves in the systems we’re building, who’s being invited to engage… and who’s still expected to stay quiet.
Not out of malice, but out of habit.
She would remind us: prompting isn’t just a technical input, it’s a cultural act that reflects what we believe is worth asking, listening to, and repeating.
She would stress that not everyone starts from the same place. Some people have always been expected to speak, while others have spent generations being told not to interrupt.
Today, we talk about responsible AI and ethical design as if the words are enough.
All these conferences that host panels and draft frameworks… I think she’d be ticked that it often stops at the performance.
Cooper would see straight through what’s going on.
She‘d be asking: Okay, now what? Who is this actually protecting? Who is it empowering? And who still isn’t being heard?
Being serious about building tools that support reflection (real reflection) means we have to start earlier. Before the output… before the question gets asked.
In education, that means treating reflection as part of learning.
In design, it means listening not just for feedback, but for the conditions that make feedback possible.
In AI, it means building systems that make space for inquiry… especially from people who were never taught to ask.
Cooper wasn’t interested in performative equity. She showed us that real equity required access to wonder.
“Let our girls feel that they are no exception to the race, but a part of it.”
She wasn’t just writing about broken systems. She was trying to build one, and it’s one we still haven’t finished.
Final thought
We talk a lot about intelligence… artificial… emotional… distributed.
Cooper was after something much deeper.
She knew that intelligence doesn’t just live in answers. Intelligence begins in the pause before a question.
She wasn’t just fighting for the right to speak. She fought for the right to think out loud.
If we’re serious about building tools that help people reason, we need to start by asking an older question:
Who still doesn’t believe they’re allowed to wonder?
“Not till race, color, sex, and condition are taken into account can we decide whether the claim is just.”
While we’re still deciding.
She already did.
Anna Julia Cooper
If this hit the right nerve, follow for more. I publish one of these stories every week to remember the people we forgot to quote.
The right to reflect was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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