You are right, saying you are from a minority group gives members status and ban protection. There's a lot of member there just trolling the most crazy stuff because nobody will speak out against a minority group, they just believe everything.
It's another example of how silly their ideology is.
On forums I've run or moderated, the rules are there partially to make sure people are treated equally, so nobody is discriminated against for a characteristic like race or sex, for example.
With SJWs, they treat people differently based on those characteristics, so a person of a certain race or sex can get away with saying things that another person wouldn't get away with and certain groups receive extra protection.
I remember seeing a thread on here back when the mods were pretty nuts too, and someone posted screenshots of a conversation they'd had with a mod where he admitted to protecting someone from being perma-banned because they were black. He said that they had had over 10 temporary bans, while usually people would get a perma-ban much sooner than that, but the justification for this was that he was "a voice that white people needed to hear". What I don't get is, if you've had to ban the guy over 10 times for breaking the rules and being a dickhead, why is he a voice that I need to hear? Just cos he's a black guy?
The SJW method of "treating people differently depending on race, sex etc." always leads to in-fighting and arguing amongst the different groups, with certain groups or group members sometimes feeling aggrieved, yet they still seem to think that it's a good idea.
Their response to this is usually to be sarcastic and say "Oh, boo hoo! Poor white people are so oppressed!", except, as a white person myself, I'm not saying that I feel "oppressed" by this shit. I just think it's dumb and a bad idea. It creates tension where there doesn't need to be any.