First off I want to say that I'm glad I'm autistic. 20-30 years of struggle & humiliation before developing decent enough social skills, but in return I get to be very good at computer. I would choose this again.
I want to write about a lesson I think I've learned about myself which might apply to you too, and I'm interested in what you think about it. It has to do with intentions and how we feel when we say something that makes someone else feel bad. This happened quite often growing up. I would say something insensitive, a person would get mad at me, and my immediate reaction was that I was blameless because I had good intentions but (due to the autism) it didn't come out right.
The hardest lesson I've had to learn is that this story isn't true. It's just 100% false. It relies on an incorrect belief that we possess full self-knowledge and don't need to learn about ourselves. You do need to learn about yourself. Your self is somebody who will become more known to you as you age and see how you react to different experiences. You will realize how mercurial & weird you can be. And you will realize you are not inherently, axiomatically, a good person with good intentions.
Autistic people are even worse at knowing what's going on inside themselves than others. The reality is you didn't necessarily have good intentions, and your rush to forgive yourself was to miss a moment of possible personal growth. Because you are fully capable of, intentionally, being an asshole.
If you legitimately believe it was unintentional, it was unintentional. That's what intention is. Even if there's some deeper bias or bigotry that informed what you said and how you said it, you still didn't intend for it to be offensive. I'm guessing your point is more about those deeper beliefs but is misattributing it to intention.
But anyway, a lot of the time (not that it happens often) I really can't see why something I said is offensive, even when trying to think about it afterward. A smaller portion of the time I see where they took offense, but believe they shouldn't have. Like people have been taking offense at "from the river to the sea", but they're just wrong.
As an autistic woman, I agree with both of these ideas: we can be wrong & we can still be good people who have good intentions. There’s so much room for offering compassion to ourselves and others in our shortcomings, because this is how we grow safely and securely. We can know that we did our best, and we see room for how we can be better. We are inherently good people, and at the same time, we’re also imperfect. Sometimes we hurt people on accident, & it should always be okay to apologize, genuinely mean it/feel remorse, wish we could change the past, and in that same breath, to also forgive ourselves by way of 1.) understanding what we could’ve done better, and 2.) doing our best to implement these changes. I really do like to believe that we as humans are always doing our best, and since this is how I as an individual operate, this is always how I will treat people, even in their faults and shortcomings. Even though I strive to be my best every day, I recognize that I have faults & shortcomings too; there’s room for both of these experiences to exist simultaneously. Usually the pain we cause others or that others cause us originates from a place of pain that we ourselves are either currently experiencing or have experienced before, so in observing/noticing shortcomings of this nature in others, there’s so much room to offer them grace; they’re most likely hurting, and we as humans need compassion and understanding most when we are in pain. Took me a long time to realize this 🫶🏼
I think people confabulate flattering post-hoc justifications for their behavior all the time, and lie to themselves about it. So I don't think it totally follows that if you believe it was unintentional then it was unintentional.