One of the more damaging aspects of the cancel culture, woke culture, etc (pick your overused generalization term) is that they normalized the idea of retroactively blaming someone for how others respond to them.
I can't control how people respond to what I say. I can attempt to predict and account for what I think responses will be, but I can be wildly wrong.
The whole way through it has felt to me like a lazy shortcut around the fact that proving intent is extremely hard. Ignoring intent completely is much easier, and that's exactly what a person is doing when they judge someone based on how others respond as a replacement for understanding what that person originally meant.
