This is, as I see it, an unfortunate side effect of vastly under valuing intent and over valuing individual interpretations and how they make people feel. There needs to be a balance, and when there's not you end up with problems. If that's what happened in this case, it might have resulted in fault being a much more nebulous concept to those people.
It's possible he said some things which ended up hurting people's feelings. It's entirely possibly he had no intention his actions be interpreted as they were. In that case, if you over value intent, he did nothing wrong, and some people were being too sensitive. If you over value interpretation, he should have known better, and it's his responsibility to be on top of how his actions would be interpreted.
Neither extreme is even remotely workable for all situations. The only thing that works in practice is that people accept that their wording sometimes needs changing based on common perceptions of it, and also that people may not have interpreted something as intended and intention matters as well. The only way to do this in practice is to actually communicate intent and interpretation when there's a problem so corrections can be made if they apply, and to both parties being open to accepting those corrections. This is obviously impossible if there is no communication.
Four people resigned from the whatever-board when Rob was not asked to leave, and have written elsewhere about their repeated interactions with him. The fact that the four of them basically decided they don't wish to work in an org that Rob works in speaks (imo obviously) to him being a relatively unpleasant person to be around. Also, I'm skeptical that four people all are blowing things out of proportion, but who knows.
There are plenty of times I've seen a small group misinterpret something, and then feed off each other, and then reinterpret future events with that new, sometimes incorrect, context. On one side we have people that were apparently so upset they decided to leave. On the other we have someone that professes to not being notified when he made people uncomfortable, and more so, actively kept in the dark to the point that he had to drag minute details out of third parties that weren't supposed to talk about it.
What I'm saying is that it's entirely possible that they are both telling the absolute truth. Even if that's the case, one side appears to be trying to communicate and come to an amicable solution. The other side doesn't appear to be willing to consider that (or have ever really considered it an avenue of addressing the problem), at least from the information presented so far, but that's not necessarily the whole story either.
What you are saying is very reasonable. But...if he did so much to upset so many, it should be easy to come up with concrete and specific examples of conduct that any reasonable person would consider unacceptable.
I'm not. Several of the people in the centre of this drama have a number of Twitter posts saying things like "kill all men" and "all men are terrible" etc. I'm completely willing to believe that these 4 people have a lot of fun, and a lot of invested identity, in being "offended" by things white men do. It doesn't reflect on his character all that much to me.
It's possible he said some things which ended up hurting people's feelings. It's entirely possibly he had no intention his actions be interpreted as they were. In that case, if you over value intent, he did nothing wrong, and some people were being too sensitive. If you over value interpretation, he should have known better, and it's his responsibility to be on top of how his actions would be interpreted.
Neither extreme is even remotely workable for all situations. The only thing that works in practice is that people accept that their wording sometimes needs changing based on common perceptions of it, and also that people may not have interpreted something as intended and intention matters as well. The only way to do this in practice is to actually communicate intent and interpretation when there's a problem so corrections can be made if they apply, and to both parties being open to accepting those corrections. This is obviously impossible if there is no communication.