All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson was published by New York Review Books in 2020, though the title is misleading — the book is not a collection of cartoons but a substantial essay collection (with some cartoons included). Johnson’s title is deliberately provocative: the phrase comes from a sign he imagines at the entrance to nirvana, and the irony is multiple. Racial problems will never end as long as race is treated as a fundamental category of being; and yet, from the Buddhist perspective Johnson inhabits, all categories — including race — are impermanent constructions that will, eventually, dissolve.
The essays range from personal memoir (growing up Black in Evanston, Illinois, in the 1950s and 1960s) to philosophical argument (the implications of Buddhist epistemology for racial identity) to literary criticism (readings of Wright, Ellison, and Morrison that emphasize their philosophical rather than sociological dimensions) to cultural commentary (the Obama presidency, the Black Lives Matter movement, the persistence of racial inequality in a society that has officially repudiated racism).
Johnson’s position is unusual in contemporary racial discourse: he takes racial injustice seriously as a political reality while insisting that racial identity is a metaphysical illusion — a position that satisfies neither the left (which treats racial identity as essential) nor the right (which treats racial injustice as exaggerated). The result is a body of thought that is genuinely independent and genuinely challenging.
Collecting All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End
First edition (New York Review Books, 2020): Trade paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $10–$20