If you call someone out for "offensive speech" and your offense rests on your own misunderstanding, it is absolutely your fault.
As a white guy wearing a suit, I got out of there without being charged. If I weren’t… I can imagine it could have gone very differently.
Also, “is was part”? So much for being clear.
Unfortunately, we seem to be in a place where bad intent is taken for granted and merits an aggressive reaction rather than placing any responsibility on the offended party to be civil and open-minded in their response to be perceiving offense.
In the case of "burning a fag", our hypothetical American has the option of inquiring about the meaning of an unfamiliar idiom rather than jumping straight to calling out the speaker.
bum is not burn.
FYI, it's combination of difficult-to-discern keming with the default font on HN, and your unfamiliarity with the phrase, but it's actually "BUM A FAG" and not "BURN A FAG".
Incidentally, did you intentionally write keming instead of kerning?
Part of being an adult is understanding that generally, people are not 4chan trolls.
If someone who's not a crackpot says to you "can I burn a gay", even though that seems unambiguous, they've probably just misspoken or are joking.
In real life almost everyone seems to get this, online it's like everything is a strawman.
Well, for one, this only applies if you already know that person is not a crackpot. Secondly, burning someone would indeed be an extreme example, but not all (accidental) offenses are so obviously monstrous. If someone said "I hate fags" (intending to say they don't like cigarettes), this would be more likely to be someone's actual homophobic opinion, depending on culture.
It's all just a bit weird to me. If someone said to me "I hate fags", I'd either ask them to clarify, or change the topic. If they were persistent, then yeah, get rid. It's not a problem that requires instantaneous resolution.
I think that both intent and perception are important, and they are both judged in the more modern understanding of "toxicity". Malintent is a direct "strike". But, lack of malintent doesn't mean that perceived offense should be entirely ignored.
Let's imagine a scenario: as in the example above, an English person says "can I burn a fag" and an American person believes they are casually thinking about hurting a gay man. The English person meant no harm; but, the American person is not at fault for not understanding this. They can complain, and the English person should explain their intent. The American person should learn and remember the meaning of this expression in British English, and the English person will need to remember that this expression may sound offensive to American listeners, and avoid it in such scenarios.
Basically, the important aspect is that a misunderstanding is not always the fault of the listener (which the intent-only model suggests: you took offense, but I didn't mean that, so you're silly for feeling offended). It is of course also not only the fault of the speaker (which the perception-only model would suggest: I felt offended by what you said, so it doesn't matter what you meant, you owe me an apology or more). Both parties are involved in a miscommunication, if indeed there was one.