Charles Johnson is likely most well-known as a novelist, having won the National Book Award for The Middle Passage (1990) and later earning a MacArthur fellowship. To many in Philosophy, he is also known as the author of Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1970, which he composed as his dissertation; Johnson earned a Master’s in Philosophy from Southern Illinois and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook. In short, Johnson can be said to be one of the most accomplished recipients of a doctorate in Philosophy in the twentieth-century United States.
What many of us aware of the preceding learned only very recently, though, is that Johnson is also a highly accomplished cartoonist. The occasion for this realization for me and many others is the recent publication of All Your Racial Problems Will Soon End: The Cartoons of Charles Johnson. This excellent collection features over two hundred of Johnson’s cartoons, beautifully restored.
With very few exceptions, these are single-panel cartoons, consisting of a tableau and caption. There are also brief textual introductions to the different sections of the book by Johnson, which are primarily autobiographical and quite interesting in their own right. Nearly all the cartoons concern questions of what can be termed the African-American experience: they deal with Black life in the United States. Aside from a brief section at the end, these cartoons are from the late 1960s and the 1970s. No doubt some will view the preponderance of these cartoons as dated for that reason. For instance, many of the cartoons included concern the contrasts between the political and aesthetic outlook of the Black Panther Party, on the one hand, and Black integrationists on the other hand (and, in some cases, a third path by way of cultural nationalists such as the US Organization). And, the artistic strategies for representing difference—particularly racial difference—to some degree run up against changes in fashion during the intervening years.
I note the propensity for these cartoons to feel dated, though, primarily because it is remarkable how fresh these cartoons feel and how insightful they remain. Without question, this volume will be rewarding to those with a greater familiarity with the political thought and popular aesthetics of African-American communities in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the Black Panthers. But with few exceptions, these cartoons remain on the money in addressing the contemporary U.S., as well as elements of antiblack racism as a global phenomenon. Of course, the topicality of these half-century-old cartoons will be bolstered for the audience willing to envision contemporary analogues. In this reader’s experience, the readiness to mind of such analogues meant that the feeling of topicality was enhanced rather than diminished.
Johnson’s autobiographical notes lay out the context for the work. He routinely cartooned for his school newspapers in high school (The Evanstonian) and college (The Daily Egyptian), as well as the local paper (The Southern Illinoisian) in his time as a Saluki. His college years began in 1966 and, given the political climate of the time both in general and among African-Americans in particular, predictably reflected a growing radicality. “During my college years,” Johnson reflects, “my work became so increasingly radical that one faculty advisor to The Daily Egyptian asked me to stop doing the cartoons in which I was calling for revolution” (8). He describes the impact of attending a lecture by Amiri Baraka, which inspired him to produce his first manuscript of cartoons, Black Humor, which finished in 1969. Unlike his experience with the constraints of cartooning for newspapers, Johnson writes that “With Black Humor, on the other hand, my imagination felt free, as if its own Juneteenth had arrived” (11). He followed that up in 1972 with a collection of comics called Half-Past Nation Time, rooted (as the title suggests) in Johnson’s appreciation of the Black Panthers and his immersion in socialist and revolutionary philosophy. After another cartoon manuscript from the mid-1970s (Lumps in the Melting Pot), his prolific output as a cartoonist began to wane. This period also saw Johnson turn his philosophical focus more toward phenomenology and Heideggerian “thinking on being,” as well as his personal turn toward Buddhism. Soon, Johnson’s exploits as a novelist would take center stage.
But what this collection reveals quite clearly is that, if Johnson had elected to remain focused on cartooning as a trade, there should be little doubt he could have become one of the most accomplished cartoonists of the twentieth century. Johnson’s gifts for narrative are on clear display in the way that he frames and illustrates: he has an excellent grasp of foregrounding and contrast, capable of communicating complex ideas and contexts with very simple imagery. His captioning is likewise concise, hitting on highly impactful phrasings that convey the thesis of each piece with clarity and directness. And, to state what might be obvious by now: these cartoons are routinely hilarious; reading this collection induced me to audible laughter again and again.
The bulk of these cartoons depict the realities of a nation immersed in white normativity and antiblack racism, and the efforts of Black people to make choices about how to live in such a milieu. In a two-frame comic from Black Humor, a Black server and a wealthy white diner pull on a wishbone in the first frame. In the second frame, the wishbone has been broken, with the server holding the lion’s share; in a case of instant wish fulfillment, the server is now white and the diner Black. Another Black Humor cartoon depicts a young boy gazing at an image of a peanut with a top hat and cane, a la Mr. Peanut. His stern mother, hands at hips, asks, “George Washington Carver, are you wasting time again?” Lumps in the Melting Pot includes a cartoon wherein a white man on a desert island rubs a lamp. A Black genie springs forth, saying, “Forget your wishes, Whitey, I’ve got a few demands.”
The police are, unsurprisingly, a recurring motif. In one of Johnson’s early cartoons, a police officer sits in a chair, firearm, and mace at the ready. He ponderously stares at a book titled Human Relations, Volume #1 and asks to himself, “What have I been missing?” In a comic from Lumps in the Melting Pot, two Black men in suits riding in a convertible have just been stopped by a police officer. Having pulled over and waiting for the officer’s approach to their car, the one says to the other, “Look moderate.” In a cartoon perhaps foreshadowing the contemporary circumstance of the strongest labor unions in the U.S. being those of police officers and prison guards, we see a Black Panther and a white police officer standing face-to-face in confrontation. The Panther says, “All power to the workers.” The officer responds, “Thanks, I’ve been in the service for ten years.”
The Panthers are a frequent topic, particularly in the comics from Half-Past Nation Time. Johnson, though clearly possessed by radicalism and an affinity for the Black Panther Party, nonetheless saw them in very human terms. The immaturity and machismo of many individual Panthers is a recurring theme; Johnson embraces the humanity of Panthers with a comic sense of how “to err is human,” rather than trying to deify or fetishize individual revolutionaries and their trappings. In one cartoon, a janitor in a men’s restroom, facing grotesque puddles on the ground before him, scolds a firearm-wielding Black Panther as the latter exits: “I sure hope your aim is better when the revolution comes!” In another, a Black man sits in a calm, domestic living room setting. Opening Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the book sends bullets flying throughout the room.
In a certain sense, what most makes this collection feel dated is precisely the frequency of representations of genuine, politically organized radicals; the images of Black daily life scarcely reflect any difference between the primary period of Johnson’s cartooning and the present day. Johnson’s artistic strategy takes seriously the foibles of the Black Panther Party and the tendency of many of its members to substitute an aesthetic of radical chic for revolutionary substance. Yet at the same time, Johnson’s artistic inventiveness and depth mean he is able to work through the shortcomings of many Panthers while he communicates basic truths about the rectitude of their revolutionary foundations. Cartoons are, of course, best suited to representing irony, a mismatch of disparate elements united in one framework or point of reference yet starkly divided in another. To treat the Panthers as human is to highlight the contrast between the deific expectations imposed on Black political figures and the comic reality of daily life, particularly daily life under the limitations imposed by systems of oppression.
While Johnson’s faculty advisor at SIU warned against direct calls for revolution, this collection makes clear that Johnson never approached cartooning polemically. This is not to say that Johnson did not use his cartoons to make points: many of these cartoons very beautifully establish the truths of various ideas. Yet Johnson did so within the comedic slice-of-life framework of the cartoon medium, rather than through efforts to subvert the form by offering naked theoretical exegeses. Johnson’s affinities for the Panthers didn’t take the form of explaining their views: he understood that a cartoon can represent the truth of a theory better than the contents of a theory. And in conveying that truth, rather than shying away from the humanity and frailties of Black Panthers, he embraced these. Johnson’s point of view on the Panthers in this collection seems to echo his perspective on Rutherford Calhoun, the narrator of The Middle Passage. Johnson would reflect years later that “at his young age, [Calhoun] doesn’t know the meaning of freedom, that freedom involves responsibility.” In his assessment of the Black Panthers, Johnson seems to be suggesting that they have a very coherent and forceful view of the necessity of Black liberation, but that this is often at odds with the all-too-human desires for instant gratification and, simply, looking cool.
In that respect, beyond its many artistic merits, Johnson’s collection has, in my assessment, value in addressing what has for recent generations functioned as a perennial problem in Black political thought. When Black youth learn of the Panthers and other Black Radicals, the first and most lasting impression is often an aesthetic one: they were cool. What often follows is greater fidelity to the aesthetics of Black radicalisms than to their political and theoretical orientations. Lewis Gordon, for instance, has raised this question in the context of hip hop. Groups such as Dead Prez have produced hip hop enmeshed in Black radicalism, but often—sometimes for the artists and sometimes for their audiences—the clearest message is about the aesthetic desirability of radical chic, rather than the political desirability of radical organization or liberatory ideals (even when, as with Dead Prez, their lyrics often evince very clear references to and understandings of the theoretical contributions of such radical movements). Indeed, even where the initial aesthetic attachment is surpassed with a genuine interest in understanding radical ideas, those ideas are often regarded as infallible, enshrouded in the indelible sheen of their aesthetic appeal. What follows is a theodicean mode of relating to Black radical thought, where its imperfections or inconsistencies are regarded as a priori absent. Johnson’s very human rendering of Panther foibles, then, can serve as a humbling reminder of the urgency of achieving liberation through the very human and very fallible project of working together rather than hoping to achieve freedom through forms of hero worship that wait for deified Black radicals of the past to be reincarnated as quasi-divinities who will lead the people to the promised land.
In short, Johnson’s cartoons reflect on the one hand a philosophical sensibility able to keenly and unflinchingly portray the truth of race and daily life and, on the other hand, an aesthetic sensibility that insists on the humor and imperfection of existence, on the need to displace seriousness in order to live the richness of the human condition. It’s an accessible collection that students and young people will be able to appreciate and that may help them develop a more mature perspective on race, politics, and the human condition, as well as a hilarious and artistically-satisfying collection that older generations will be able to devour with glee.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
