[compbio]

It is not racism. Racism is the attitude/belief that one race is superior to another race. Also military veteran is not a race.

It is discrimination. Discrimination is having applicants use 23andMe to prove that they are more black than white, so you can give them a different preferential treatment.

Next to making the world a better place through more black startup founders, this is a PR move. Paul Graham stopped posting on YC around the time of those terrible threads on females in tech. Hackernews became renowned for their toxic response to these issues. You can still see some of that in the rest of this thread and in my comment.

What followed was Female Founders and this initiative. This discriminatory trend will only continue. YC thinks it can make their startup portfolio more diverse, by adding more black startup founders. In this lies the hidden assumption that black founders act or think differently than white founders. The terrible alternative being that YC judges the diversity of their portfolio on the skin color of their founders.

[johnathanNYC]

This was incredibly hard to read, but you are correct in one thing, it is not racism. It's Institutional racism, which is any system of inequality based on race.