Someone says it at the end of a hard conversation: “But you have so much to be grateful for.” Something in your chest goes tight. Not because you don’t already know that. Not because joy is foreign to you. Because in that moment, you are being asked to make your pain smaller so the room can feel more comfortable. Because gratitude has always come with a condition: stop feeling what you actually feel and be grateful you don’t feel worse,
If that has ever made the word feel like nails on a chalkboard, you are not broken and you are not alone. You have been paying attention.
We want to offer a different understanding of radical gratitude for BIPOC people, one that does not ask you to perform peace you haven’t found, or shrink your grief to make your healing more palatable. One that holds all of it: the rage, the tenderness, the exhaustion, and the love.
What “Gratitude Culture” Actually Asked of Us
Gratitude culture exploded in the early 2000s, riding the self-help wave many of us grew up inside. Books like The Secret and the law of attraction movement popularized a particular idea: that positive thinking shapes lived experience and can even predict success. Think good thoughts. Attract good things. Be grateful for what you have and more will come.
For a lot of us, that philosophy landed like an accusation.
When you are navigating systemic racism, generational trauma, daily microaggressions, and the accumulated weight of living in a body the world has decided is lesser, the suggestion that your positive thinking is the only barrier between you and your flourishing is not inspiration. It is victim-blame with a vision board attached to it.
The message underneath was: your anger is in the way. Your grief is holding you back. Your exhaustion is a choice. Be grateful instead.
Of course you felt angry. That anger was proportionate. That grief was information. The exhaustion was your nervous system telling you the truth about what you were carrying. None of it was dysfunction. None of it needed to be “gratituded” away.
The Secondary Wound: Having to Explain Why That Hurt
There is the original harm, and then there is what comes after: being told you overreacted. Being asked to justify your response to people who did not experience what you experienced. Having to translate your pain into language that is legible to the people who caused it, or who simply cannot see it.
Gratitude culture added another layer to that wound. It pathologized proportionate responses to systemic harm and called the pathology a mindset problem. It told us the fix was internal when the problem was structural. It turned survival into a personal failing, as if the right attitude would have protected us from what was never about our attitude at all.
We are naming this because it matters. If gratitude has felt hollow or hostile to you, that response makes sense. You were not failing at healing. You were refusing a version of healing that required you to lie.
What Radical Gratitude Actually Is
Radical gratitude for BIPOC people is not about compliance. It is not saying “this is hard, but I suppose I should be grateful it isn’t worse.” That is not gratitude. That is submission wearing gratitude’s name.
What we mean is something older and more honest than that.
Our ancestors did not wait until the fight was finished to laugh. They cooked good food and told stories and found joy in each other while living through things that should have made joy impossible. They loved their children fiercely in conditions designed to make love feel futile. They held grief and celebration in the same hands because that is what survival has always asked of us.
Radical gratitude is the practice of holding complexity, of refusing the binary that says you must choose between acknowledging harm and acknowledging beauty. You can be furious at the system and deeply grateful for your community. You can grieve what has been lost and still find the meal delicious, the music right, the laughter necessary. You can be exhausted and still recognize that something today was good.
This is not spiritual bypassing. This is not the law of attraction in different clothes. Holding two truths at once does not require you to minimize either one. It is holding multitudes and practicing a revolutionary skill.
The Difference Worth Naming
There is a distinction that changes everything:
What status quo gratitude asks: “Things are hard, but they could be worse. Be grateful.” This asks you to measure your suffering against worse suffering and feel better about it. It asks you to accept what is.
What radical gratitude offers: “This is hard. And finding this moment of comfort, this connection, this small joy that gives me fuel to keep going.” This does not ask you to accept anything. It asks you to resource yourself for the resistance.
One is a request for your silence. The other is a tool for your continued presence.
Complexity is not weakness. The ability to hold more than one truth at a time is something oppressive systems actively work to prevent. When they flatten our experience into simple narratives, simple gratitude fits neatly inside those narratives. When we insist on the full picture, we become harder to manage.
Practicing This, Without the Performance
So what does this actually look like in your body, in your week, outside of a concept?
It looks like noticing, without forcing. Not sitting down to generate a gratitude list when you are in the middle of grief, but letting yourself notice when something lands softly. A conversation that felt like exhaling. A meal that tasted like home. A moment where you felt held.
It looks like letting those moments be real without using them to talk yourself out of what is also real. The good thing does not cancel the hard thing. They exist together.
It looks like finding your people and recognizing that as a resource worth naming. Community, for many of us, has been the primary site of healing. The places where we did not have to explain ourselves, where our full range of emotion was already understood those places are not small. They are the infrastructure of our survival.
It looks like working with a therapist who gets this. Someone who does not ask you to reframe before they have helped you feel. Someone who understands that your anger at the system and your capacity for joy are not in competition with each other.
Finding Support That Holds the Whole Picture
If you are somewhere in the middle of all of this, curious about gratitude but suspicious of how it has been sold to you, you are in the right place. That suspicion is discernment. Bring it with you.
Healing in Colour exists because BIPOC people deserve therapists who already understand the weight of what we carry. You should not have to spend your sessions explaining why the world is hard before you can get to the actual work of healing. Our directory connects you with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values, people who can hold complexity with you rather than asking you to simplify it.
You Do Not Have to Choose
The version of gratitude that asked you to perform contentment you did not feel was never asking for your healing. It was asking for your cooperation.
Radical gratitude asks for something different. It asks you to stay present to your own life, to the hard parts and the moments of grace, to the rage and the tenderness, to the grief and the laughter that has always, somehow, found its way through.
You do not have to resolve the contradiction. You do not have to pick a lane. You are allowed to be furious and still notice that the light today was beautiful. You are allowed to grieve and still find the music right. Both are true. Both belong to you.
We are here, in all of it, alongside you.
Additional Resources
Browse BIPOC therapists in Ottawa
Related Reading
- When Therapy Causes Harm: Microaggressions in the Therapy Room
- BIPOC Burnout and Imposter Syndrome
- What Is Intergenerational Trauma? And How It Shows Up in Immigrant Families
Not ready for therapy yet?
- Explore our Resources page for community organizations and mental health tools
- Follow us on Instagram for culturally sensitive mental health content
- Join our newsletter for monthly BIPOC mental health resources
About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
Learn more: About Us | Our Statement of Values
If you are in crisis, please reach out to Crisis Services Canada: 1-833-456-4566 or visit crisisservicescanada.ca