Grievance and the Traps of Identity

Humility is the antidote to grievance because it recognizes that the world doesn’t conform perfectly to any one person’s desires.

Photo by Michela Serventi on Unsplash

I’ve been “Black” for a while now. I put the word for race in quotes because while I am culturally “African-American” the construct of race, at least how it occurs to me today vs 30+ years ago in college, is very different.

My father, Larry Sr., who would have turned 84 on August 14th, was “Black,” too. He wasn’t “Black Like Me” nor was he “Black” like Eddie Murphy doing his iconic skit in the 1980s on Saturday Night Live where he portrayed a phenotypically “White” man, and comically benefited greatly, the reverse mirror image of the main character in the Black Like Me film, referenced above.

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My “Old Dude” (how I generally called him) didn’t have the privileges he provided for me growing up. His father was a butcher, and my grandmother (Florence Laurabell Mae Jackson Johnson, aka “MeeMaw”) was a licensed practical nurse. My grandfather (Hubert Johnson) died at age 51 when my father was 18 years old. My father started working to earn money, by necessity, around then before he went off to the Marines and eventually to university and mortuary science school.

I worked in high school but didn’t have to work. Most seasons, I played a sport and didn’t have the discipline to hold a job and focus on my education. I had summer jobs and later took part-time jobs in the afternoons, weekends, and evenings to enable my social life. Before that, the only work I did was washing my dad’s funeral home’s fleet of cars and doing odd things around his office to keep it tidy. But that was more father-son bonding time. When I would reference wanting to be paid, my father made it clear that my lifestyle was afforded by the business to which I made a very minor contribution. 

My father inspired a penchant for entrepreneurship, and both sides of my family boast generations of entrepreneurs. While in my mother’s and father’s families, I observed and discussed my father’s daily grind and the ebbs and flows of business ownership and management with him over the years.