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Comment by sethbannon | Hacker News Reader

Hey Micael, exciting to see YC continuing to battle the inequality that exists in the startup world.

I'm curious -- why did you chose to craft the program along racial lines, as opposed to along socioeconomic lines, which seems to be the recent trend in higher ed affirmative action?

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Because racism still exists:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-blac... "For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one."

That's a poor study to cite. If you took two people of any one race and sent them looking for jobs, probably as often as not one would fare much better than the other just because of individual variability. You get hired based on your interview(s), not your resume.

Generally people who research employment discrimination send out identical resumes except for a test factor and then use the number of interview invitations as a proxy for reaction to the test factor.

Then cite that rather than an unscientific, non-rigorous "study" (read: anecdote).

Let's take a look at the actual citation:

Taken from a forthcoming paper by Sampson and Kristin L. Perkins, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality among Chicagoans, 1995-2013,” in the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Professor Sampson has an endowed chair at Harvard and was previously the chair of his department there. While I have not yet gone looking for preprint versions, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that he might have a firm grasp on the difference between statistical and anecdotal information. I see no reason for the author of the Atlantic article to recapitulate the methodology of every single academic reference in a long discussion of social policy.

And Watson, from Watson and Crick, who discovered the underlying commonality of all humanity, DNA, and won a Nobel prize for that work, was extremely racist[0].

That's the problem with arguing based on name recognition. Cite rigorous, peer-reviewed, established work. Let the veracity of the work speak for itself.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/01/dna-jam...

I'm not sure if this is your implication, but neither Watson nor Crick is an expert on race (race being not a biological phenomenon but a very social one).

I could see it working out with an application 'why are you underrepresented?' rather than trying to guess at categories. As above, someone growing up dirt poor, but white, in rural Alabama might qualify. Or, say, Ahmed the clock guy when he founds a company.

But I have no experience with these things, so applaud the effort. The YC guys seem good at changing/improving things as they go.

Agree with Sam's comment on this thread - we should do both

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