Gratitude? HARD PASS

We ask too much of gratitude.

We ask it to ease our existential angst, prepare us to face the day, help us meet sales targets, and retain our employees. We repeatedly turn to celebrities and hopefluencers to remind us that the secret to happiness lies in the beautiful things we already have if only we’d draw our attention to them.

And write them down in a special place.

Gratitude journals and digital apps have found purchase as a subset within the personal development marketplace, where books, apps, planners, seminars, coaching, and other offerings abound, designed to help consumers calm down, boost confidence, grow skills, and reach their version of enlightenment. The market was estimated to be worth $40 billion in 2022. It’s hard to do even a nominal search on the brain science of gratitude without being offered an app, a newsletter, or a Black Friday deal.

But gratitude, as tired as it must be, and as valuable as it is — and I believe it is! — has its work cut out for it now, as people, families, communities, and perhaps entire companies find themselves apart, poised warily across a political or ideological divide.

And sometimes, it asks too much of us.

As I often am, I am reminded now of the lessons offered by the late novelist Toni Morrison, who plumbed the moral complexity of gratitude in her work. Gratitude hits different in marginalized or disadvantaged groups. It can show up as a required virtue, a cost of doing business, and a tactic to ingratiate oneself with people in power that reinforces harmful hierarchies.

The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel, about the life of a poor 11-year-old Black girl named Pecola Breedlove and her two friends, the sisters Claudia and Frieda. In the complex time of 1940s Ohio, Shirley Temple emerges as a polarizing figure for the trio, as Pecola and Frieda openly long for the Shirley Temple merch of the day. But Claudia, who receives a Shirley Temple doll for Christmas, takes a different view. She defiantly dissects the doll, expressing her “hatred for all the Shirley Temples of the world” while angrily searching the toy’s guts for its magic power. “[A]ll the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured,” she says.

Her working-class mother is livid, unable to bridge the gap between the painful racial hierarchy the doll represents — who will treasure girls who look like Claudia? — and the sacrifices that were made to give her a mainstream gift. “I-never-had-a-baby-doll-in-my-whole-life-and-used-to-cry-my-eyes-out-for-them. Now-you-got-one-a-beautiful-one-and-you-tear-it-up-what’s-the-matter-with-you?” And the fight is on in lyrical Morrisonian prose, another holiday ruined.

So, what is the matter with you?

This is the question I expect we will all hear a lot as we navigate whatever the future brings. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset? Why don’t you knock all this diversity shit off?

For anyone who cares about an equitable world, this feels like a particularly grim time. With the increasingly successful assaults on inclusion work, I’m expecting a return to public demands for “big G” gratitude by those in power.

Though it will likely show up in new and exciting ways, I should mention that this is a familiar experience for colonized peoples who were expected to express thankfulness for “civilizing” interventions; for economic “opportunities” that amounted to land theft; and for educational “improvements” that were abusive, violent, systematic erasures of Indigenous culture and knowledge systems.

(Pro tip: You can tell it’s an old-school power play if you’re called “ingrateful” if you decide to dissect the doll instead.)

But “small g” gratitude still belongs to all of us. The distinction between what we as individuals need to thrive — safety, health, community, joy, meaningful work, and yes, a grateful spirit — and what the world charges as the price of admission is ours to make. One is good for the soul, the other is just some okey-doke.

So, let’s dig in. Together.

Happy Thanksgiving, if that’s a holiday where you live. I’m so very grateful for you.

And I do mean that personally.

A version of this essay was originally published in the Equity Observer email newsletter. Catch up on past issues here. Sign up for insightful commentary, breaking news, and community shout-outs delivered twice weekly. Find your people.