There’s a certain kind of praise that feels like a trap.
“You’re so strong.”
“I don’t know how you keep working through all of this. You’re incredible.”
“Your people are unbelievably resilient.”
“It’s incredible how much you’ve endured.”
These aren’t always compliments, especially when you’re from the Global Majority. They’re often a way to sidestep accountability and romanticize survival instead of asking the hard questions.
Whether it’s images of children in Gaza feeding their cats amid relentless bombings and forced starvation; or videos from Yemen showing people dancing and stomping on the American flag; or stories of Beirut apartment buildings still standing after one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, we’re constantly being celebrated for surviving. For making do. For rebuilding. For not collapsing completely. But behind every narrative of resilience is a quieter truth: we weren’t supposed to have to be this resilient in the first place.
And yet, we are:
Resilient regardless of illegal occupation, settler violence, siege, and war crimes across Palestine.
Resilient regardless of blockade and endless war in Yemen.
Resilient regardless of corruption, economic collapse, unlivable inflation, and foreign meddling in Lebanon and Egypt.
Resilient regardless of military crackdowns, internet blackouts, and suffocating silence in Sudan.
Resilient regardless of ICE raids, family separation, and deportations carried out with bureaucratic cruelty.
Resilient regardless of debt traps and IMF-imposed austerity in Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Resilient regardless of land grabs and extractivist economies in Indigenous communities.
Resilient regardless of border violence and asylum systems built to dehumanize.
Resilient regardless of military coups and targeted killings in Myanmar.
Resilient regardless of Taliban rule and decades of foreign occupation in Afghanistan.
Resilient regardless of broken promises after the revolution and authoritarian backsliding in Tunisia.
And more and more examples from across the Global Majority.
But that’s not because we’re inherently tougher or more capable of enduring pain. It’s because entire systems of colonialism, occupation, neoliberal economics, proxy wars, international indifference have made it impossible to live otherwise. Our resilience is not a miracle. It’s a response to structural abandonment.
Here’s the thing we’re rarely allowed to say out loud: we’re so fucking tired of being resilient. We’re tired of being admired for surviving systems that should have never been allowed to exist. And that’s where the danger of glorification comes in.
Because when resilience becomes the headline, it erases the violence that made it necessary. It shifts the focus from what’s breaking us to how well we’re pretending we’re okay. It’s a soft, almost admiring kind of violence. One that claps for your ability to swim without ever asking who pushed you into the water.
Even in our homes, it shows up. Families scraping together meals under inflation that would make headlines elsewhere. Mothers raising generations without any institutional support. Young people navigating collapse with humor and hustle, constantly repackaging struggle as ‘creativity.’ It’s brilliant, sure, but it’s also exhausting. And none of it should be normal.
We are not meant to be resilient always and forever.
We deserve more than applause for our survival. We deserve justice. We deserve rest. We deserve dignity. We deserve infrastructure that doesn’t fail us, systems that don’t exploit us, leaders who don’t abandon us. And most of all, we deserve the space to break down, to be angry, to grieve, without being told how inspiring we are for holding it together.
So the next time the world praises our resilience, I hope it asks itself: who benefits from this narrative? Who gets to look away because we’re so good at surviving? And what might be possible if we weren’t forced to be resilient at all?
Because resilience, when it’s born from neglect, isn’t something to celebrate. It’s what’s left when justice is delayed. When systems fail. When the world abandons you, then applauds you for staying alive.
Maybe we’ve had enough of that applause. Maybe resilience isn’t the story we want to tell anymore.
What we need now is something harder, messier, and far more radical than resilience: we need resistance. We need refusal to carry on as if resilience and endurance are the same thing as dignity. We need reparation.
Because we’re not here to inspire. We’re here to demand and disrupt.
And that’s not resilience. That’s liberation.
This is such an important point that almost nobody in the global minority thinks about.
So much this. ❤️❤️❤️