It is a fact of life that people of different races and backgrounds tend to hear comments and statements differently.

A comment that might seem quite innocuous to a black person can be deeply offensive to a white person and vice versa. An innocent comment to someone who has all his physical faculties can be deeply hurtful to someone who is handicapped in some way.

When someone is black and physically handicapped, they will often be especially well tuned in to discriminatory statements of all kinds, because they are all too accustomed to being patronised and know when they are being belittled, regardless of whether the person making the comments is conscious of it or not.

That is what makes the statement in this newspaper on Saturday of Willard Fox, the long-time chairman of the Bermuda Physically Handicapped Association, so remarkable.

Mr. Fox came to the defence of Dr. Shaun O?Connell, who was dismissed last September from the post he had held for 29 years at the Bermuda College as a mathematics lecturer.

Dr. O?Connell was dismissed for making allegedly racist remarks in a private conversation that was overheard by another lecturer. After agreeing and going through ?diversity training?, Dr. O?Connell refused to apologise.

As a result, a panel of officials at the College decided he should be dismissed and he was, by registered letter, and apparently without right of appeal within the College itself.

To many people who know Dr. O?Connell, this came as a shock. Bermuda Sun columnist Stuart Hayward, who is the epitome of liberalism, said it did not smell right. Robert Stewart, the epitome of conservatism, likened Dr. O?Connell?s dismissal to politically correct Nazism. Former Government Senator Calvin Smith saw it as a blow to freedom of speech.

Now Mr. Fox has joined the campaign to get Dr. O?Connell a hearing before an employment tribunal. Mr. Fox may well carry more moral weight than any of Dr. O?Connell?s other supporters.

No one knows more about discrimination than the handicapped and if Mr. Fox states that he has never heard Dr. O?Connell make a racist remark in the course of a near-30 year friendship, then he should be believed.

Certainly, those who know Dr. O?Connell and his history of raising thousands of dollars for the disabled find it hard to believe that he is a racist, and yet that is what he has been accused of.

Based on what has been reported of the notes of the conversation that were taken down last year, it is hard to see how anyone could require that the participants could have been made to attend diversity training, let alone grounds for dismissal.

To be sure, the discussion was about race. But who in Bermuda hasn?t discussed race at some time? And if making derogatory remarks abut people was a firing offence, then it is likely that most people in Bermuda would be unemployed.

What is of deeper concern is that Dr. O?Connell seems to have been denied any right of appeal.

The Employment Act Tribunal was set up to deal with precisely this kind of situation, but six months after the fact, Dr. O?Connell cannot get a hearing.

Bermuda College president Michael Orenduff ? who will soon be able to hand this problem off to his successor, whoever it is ? has said that due process has been followed. But if Dr. O?Connell has no avenue of appeal, that cannot be the case.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of this situation, Dr. O?Connell deserves to be heard and the Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees labour relations, needs to act.