Yes, and this is what makes it so hard and sort of a wicked problem. This is a “best case scenario” but there’s lots of other worse outcomes like the one you m

Yes, and this is what makes it so hard and sort of a wicked problem. This is a “best case scenario” but there’s lots of other worse outcomes like the one you mention, or if dev2 reported Dev1 for a microaggression. I think the important, and hard part, is to have trust and existing relationships where people can discuss these types of scenarios. Also my perception is that Dev1 was not an idiot and did not need to do anything for his language and the moral here is that Dev2 was able to learn more context around Dev1’s speech so they understood that there was nothing racial about it. We all could have read lots of books about race and Dev1’s statement should not have changed. But that doesn’t mean that Dev3 is right. I think we want to train and improve Dev3s so they become more like Colleague. And we also want to build more relationships like between Dev2 and Colleague so that Dev2 could talk to Dev1 directly. I don’t like advice that people should be more thick skinned, because for every scenario where the misunderstanding is on the part of Dev2 there are lots of scenarios where the statement is racist. Maybe the heuristic is that we should be more curious before judging.