"Intent is hard to prove" - sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. In the case of SH, Fulani seems to have been very quick to assume the most malign intent on SH's part. That is also difficult to prove, but you seem to have taken it as read, which is interesting.
To use a PP's example, "P*ki shop" fairly obviously includes an intent to be racist because it incorporates a word which from its very beginnings was understood to be a racist slur.
Whereas, for example, my octogenarian, stroke survivor mother's use of the phrase 'coloured people' is not racist because she doesn't mean it as a slur, merely a descriptor, and her age combined with the brain injury she suffered from her stroke makes it really hard for her to adopt a new phrase such as 'people of colour' when, in her mind, the old one suffices as a factual descriptor and is very similar to the new one.
I think it would be a very sad world if we always assumed the most malign possible intent behind someone's words, unless they were cognitively, linguistically and socially able to stick to rapidly changing social mores. I think such a world would, ultimately, be barely liveable, especially for people of age, neurodivergent conditions, or whose first language is not the language in which the conversation is being conducted..
We need forebearance for people to get things wrong in social situations, otherwise all social situations become fraught with danger.
Also, intent is an important factor in all sorts of human interactions. That's why mens rea is kind of a fundamental thing at law. And for society to work with minimal violence, we have got into a habit over the centuries of assuming that the intent of our interlocutors are fundamentally good unless we are given really good indications that they intend to do us harm. I don't see how society would work if we discard that fact and decide that intent is always malign, or doesn't matter at all.