When you make that your standard for courtesy, you were assuming that how a privileged person like you would like to be treated defines what courtesy is. There are lots of things you can say to a marginalized person that would offend them, but would not offend you. For example, calling a black person “articulate“ will offend many Black people, because they infer from this that you expected not to find them to be articulate. i’ve been called articulate many times, and it never occurred to me to read the word that way, because I’m not a member of any marginalized group. This is probably not true for all Black people (“ we are not a monolith“ as the saying goes), but a lot of black writers say they would interpret the phrase that way, so I never use that word when complimenting a black writers.

I think it’s a mistake to think we can collect observations like this into a massive volume that can function as a Talmud of political correctness. but we do have to recognize that you can’t just use the golden rule and assume that if I wouldn’t mind hearing that expression, a marginalized person wouldn’t mind it either. I think the best solution is to try to get to know the person as an individual. It’s true that their marginalized identity will always have some impact on how they react in social situations, but each person embodies this identity in different ways. Each black person responds to being black differently, and each woman responds to being a woman differently, but unlike us privileged people, they do have to respond to these identities in some way. so I think the best strategy is to get to know the individual to see how they respond to that identity. That’s one reason I read so many different black writers with different beliefs and attitudes.