Woke in Plain English: "Minoritize"

Minoritize. To “minoritize” means to turn a group into a minority. If a group is minoritized, that means they have less prestige and status than dominant groups. It also means they are treated unfairly. Dictionary.com has a perfect example: though women constitute a majority of employees, they're routinely minoritized, passed over for promotion, and poorly represented in upper management. The key thing to understand is that systems, or the structures in which people work and live, minoritize people. In this example, the system causes women to be minoritized. Even if there are no individuals who want to keep women down, women can still be oppressed and denied opportunities due to the systems in which they work. Individuals who use the word “minoritize” believe systems that support the powerful naturally minoritize people in an effort to keep them oppressed. They believe that systems are designed to do this in order to maintain power. As such, classifying people who hold less power as minorities is something the powerful do to keep the less powerful down.