That's what the parent is saying. The aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men. If you were striving for true diversity, it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity, but if you are only optimizing for optical diversity then those considerations go out the window.
> Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?
People with different backgrounds are "better" at diversity than people with the same background who look dissimilar, for sure. The wealthy black woman who went to school at Stanford alongside all the other white men on your team does not bring any meaningful difference in viewpoint. The tribesman from Kenya, on the other hand, comes with a very different outlook.
Of course, something akin to "Must be a US Citizen" is attached to most jobs because we don't actually care about diversity, just optics.
