When someone is harming another person, respect matters more than niceness. Speaking up to protect them, even if it seems mean, is the respectful thing to do. Confusing the two prevents the intervention that safety requires.
If somebody's doing something wrong to another person and harming them, should the person being harmed be worried about being nice when the person's harming them? Yes or no? No. So the mistake we have today is we tell everybody, always be nice. Nope. There are times it's not about being nice. It's about being respectful, which means I need to speak out. I need to do something here to stop that from happening. It's not about being nice in this moment. Somebody might even think the way I talked was mean, but I did it for the safety of another human being. But I was respectful, right? So huge difference. That's why I said I want to come back to nice. Respectful and nice is different.
