Being told that something you said was humiliating can produce an immediate urge to explain yourself. You meant it affectionately. Everyone was laughing. You would have said the same thing to anyone. All of that may be true, and still leave the other person’s experience almost entirely unexamined.
A Google News listing points to Queen’s University material titled “Harassment and Discrimination: Foundational Awareness and Understanding”. The listing alone does not establish what the material covers or how it is used. Its emphasis on foundational understanding does, however, invite a useful question: what would we need to understand before any guidance could make a difference to our behaviour?
Perhaps the most uncomfortable starting point is that we are unreliable judges of how easy we are to challenge.
Someone may be quite relaxed about disagreement when there is nothing to lose. The situation changes when the person disagreeing depends on them for work, a reference, or acceptance within a group. An invitation to “just say something” can sound generous to the person issuing it. For the person weighing the consequences, it may offer very little reassurance.
There is a complication here. Feeling hurt cannot, by itself, settle every dispute about what happened or what should follow. People misunderstand one another. Accusations need fair consideration, and the person accused must have an opportunity to respond. A workplace where everybody fears an irreversible judgement over an awkward sentence would hardly encourage honest human contact.
Yet fairness becomes a convenient hiding place if we demand a complete case before we will even listen. We can take someone seriously while facts remain unsettled. We can ask what happened without immediately conducting the defence.
That has a fairly ordinary consequence for daily life. When someone objects to our behaviour, we might let them finish before describing our intentions. We might consider whether others have a genuine way to disagree with us, particularly when we have some influence over their lives.
Understanding has practical weight at precisely that moment: when we have an explanation ready, and allow ourselves to hear something that might require us to change it.