I don't understand your overall point here. I think you're talking about a snowballing situation due to an increased acceptance of racism (so rather than talking about how an individual reacts to criticism, instead how an increasing in size group reacts to it), but I'm a bit stressed at the moment and feeling at odds with things, so I'm going to duck out of this for now and maybe come back to it.
I'm actually in agreement with your point, just that I feel like you're kinda missing where the criticism is starting from, and that its not founded, yet they demand that these persons/groups they're going after act perfectly civil (when they often are not when they instigate the situations), completely appease their requests for proof that "they belong there", and then harass them.
You're talking about the totally warranted criticism of this woman for being racist. I'm saying, she's the one that initiated the criticism based purely on her own racist feelings, and that I think its unfair to be so critical of these groups for not always being perfectly civil when responding to such racist harassment (which they have been telling us happens alarmingly frequently; it wasn't until the past few years that they've had the widely affordable technology to be able to document this harassment to prove it, because until recently a lot of people weren't buying their claims about how ridiculous and rampant it is). Yet there are people who exploit that fact to further malign the persons they're harassing (for instance, racist asshole goes up to someone says racist shit to them, gets punched, they then get the person charged with assault and then tell people how the people of that race are violent people - look one assaulted me for no reason! - to further their racist claims against them).
Basically I'm saying that conservatives have bastardized things to be the arbiter of these situations. They cry about being harassed and discriminated against unfairly, yet they're consistently the ones doing it. But they then go around saying "well if they are so good people, why are they getting mad when I simply ask them to prove that they work/live/etc there?", trying to paint them as being the aggressors. They're trying to distort the logic that you used by trying to intentionally incite the people to act out in response.
And then I was just saying that in my experience people acting this way tend to double if not triple, or more, down on this type of behavior versus showing genuine remorse. We might get a bullshit boilerplate apology, but we often see them complaining about it and acting like they were the real victims (see one of the other threads here about a cop that shot an unarmed guy in the back; he was "sorry for shooting the guy" but he sure seems more sorry that he had to deal with consequences of it than he was for having done it). Lots of times they become worse shitheads (see "Legitimate rape" Todd Akin who openly has said he never was sorry and that he's only sorry for having apologized for saying the fucked up stuff he'd said), and others sharing their mentality get worse as they view it as attacks on them. Conservatives literally have personal persecution complex as a base ideological belief (which was largely due to religion but they've adapted it to every other aspect of their lives including politics - they will literally simultaneously argue that they're unfairly disadvantaged while gloating about being the best and getting away with crapping on others because of it).