Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization
I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, and that's probably not something we can resolve in a comment thread. My position is based on data I've read, and I'm sure yours is as well, but it would probably take a lot of time to merge those data sets and come to a consensus opinion.
At this point, I actually think some of the people in the "majority group" are being marginalized, due to the focus on basically anyone else being preferentially hired. When a person from the majority group is being considered for a role, the attitude I've seen expressed during hiring discussions is, "But is there nobody else available? Ugh. Oh well, I guess we need to hire this white guy." And that's not limited to attitude... I've heard very similar words expressed.
Consider a lot of the camera-related fiascos in the tech industry recently. Until very recently, Twitter routinely cropped out non-white faces on photo previews. Why? Potentially because people of color weren't involved enough in the process to notice. Augmented reality and facial recognition routinely fail when paired up with the faces of people of color. Amazon in the not-so-distant past tried to use AI to filter resumes, and it wound up throwing out all of the women. If more women had been involved, perhaps that might have been caught earlier.
A lot of these are hypotheticals, and we may never know how the ethnic composition of the teams affected the final output, but it's hard to argue that having a more diverse team is a bad thing when it comes to issues like this.
And for what it's worth, the thought isn't "ugh, we gotta hire this white guy," but rather "does hiring yet another white guy bring something to the table that we don't already have and couldn't get from a woman or person of color?" The answer is "probably not."
Also, not all white people, black people, or any other group of people based on their skin color, sex, or other obvious characteristics are the same. A black person and a white person both with a net worth above a million dollars will have life experiences more similar than two white people, one of which grew up incredibly poor and one of which has a million dollars.
In my opinion, we shouldn't be trying to achieve diversity on the basis of outward characteristics. What that ends up doing is giving huge advantage to already-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes marginalized groups, and a huge disadvantage to non-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes advantaged groups, statistically speaking.
We should judge people as individuals, not as members of categories.
What about the advantage and disadvantage of people who grew up in single parent vs two parent households? What about people who are first vs 3rd generation college students? People who had to work during college vs those who didn't? What about their mental health? Abuse as a child? Are we going to put all these on a questionnaire? There are too many possible influences on a person's life to account for, and focusing only on the outward physical appearance seems like a very blunt and inaccurate instrument.
Serious question. How much of this is due to “move fast and break things” and incompetence as opposed to discrimination and biases caused by white people?
I keep hearing the narrative in podcasts that this is an issue caused by having white people be involved in tech, but I’ve seen many cases where developers just ship something out and expect the users to do testing.
