The thing is, everyone in a professional setting is expected to minimize their emotions for the sake of workplace civility. That’s one of the foundational purposes of professionalism. It is not fair to subject your coworkers to your personal issues in a place where they have to be around you all day. You never know what’s going on in another person’s life. In asking you what they can do to help, they are going beyond their professional responsibilities of minimizing their emotions and trying to see if they can help you with yours.

I just think expecting so much from coworkers who truly do have good intentions and want to help is so self-centered. Their good intentions aren’t enough? Then what is? They have to step into your reality, read your mind, and word their offer in a way where you get to choose if it’s good enough for you to interpret it how it was meant to be interpreted?

In general, if you take away the power of intention from language and put all the meaning in the interpretation, then what happens is that essentially no one has control over their own language. Anything can be interpreted to be offensive.

I understand that there are bigger social issues at hand that could be affecting your black colleagues, but again, that does not negate any hardships that others are experiencing in their personal lives. It is so narcissistic to believe that people who already want to help should bend over backwards to even frame their offer for help in a way that you deem acceptable. Who are you to tell people what their words mean? Do you really want to live in a world where other people can strip the meaning of your words away just because they chose to interpret it differently from how it was intended?

Overall, this is great advice for anyone going through a hardship. If it were someone I truly cared about, I would take your advice and make specific offers, not just say “how can I help?” such as a friend going through a loss or someone I would normally voluntarily go out of my way for anyway.

The difference is that in the professional world, (1) these people owe you nothing, (2) they are in the same position of having to suppress their true emotions for the sake of workplace civility, and (3) they have to be around you every day. It’s not fair that in addition to the normal stressors of work, even if they want to help, it’s still not enough. I know that personally if I offered help to a coworker and it wasn’t accepted just because it wasn’t worded properly, that coworker would just be another workplace burden to deal with.