Racism is sustained not only through direct discrimination, racial gaslighting, and macroaggressions, but also through the stories that society tells about racialised people. These stories can appear in news, films, media, schoolbooks, political debates, workplace prejudices, or in everyday interactions. They often portray Black people and Black communities as one-dimensional: as inferior, dangerous, foreign, uneducated and always in crisis. When such messages are repeated often enough, they become difficult to challenge. They shape how White people see Black people, but also how Black people see themselves.

Like when Black youth are forced to question whether they are skilled, capable, intelligent, beautiful, or professional enough or whether they truly belong. This is one way racism can become internalised. But counter-stories offer different perspectives through the stories told by Black people whose experiences have often been ignored, simplified, or distorted. Counter-stories do not deny the realities of race, racism, exclusion, nor racial trauma; they instead make these realities visible while challenging them and showing the full complexity of the Black life and Black experience. Counter-stories come in different shapes; it can be a life story, personal memory, a poem, a podcast episode, a theatre scene, a family story, a photovoice exhibition, or a conversation with friends.

It can be about racism, but also about humour, resilience, community, creative resistance or Black achievement, heritage and joy. The purpose is not to create a positive story that hides the Black struggle, it is to refuse the idea that racial oppression is the only thing that defines Black life and Black experience. For Black youth, creating or hearing counter-stories is deeply affirming; it helps them recognise that painful racism experiences are connected to wider social, and racial patterns, rather than being proof that something is inherently wrong with them. It shows them their life stories and experiences have to be told on their own terms, to challenge racist narratives and reclaim their Blackness.