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Does the color of your skin play a role in getting opportunity? This is the question explored in CNN’s “Black in America: The New Promised Land, Silicon Valley” hosted by Soledad O’Brien, which airs tonight at 8PM EST.

STORY: Soledad O’Brien: “They Call Me Auntie Sole” 

Sillicon Valley is the starting point for all tech entrepreneurs. It is the home of billion dollar companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. If you have a tech idea and you want investment, Sillicon Valley is where you should be.

Throughout the documentary CNN follows NewMe Accelerator which supports under-represented minorities.

The accelerator gathered eight black entrepreneurs and assisted them with their startup internet companies as they prepared to make their pitch to investors in Sillicon Valley.

But if you are a person of color, African-American or Latino getting financial support for your startup company may require more effort than the average young white male. Only 1 percent of venture funding in Sillicon Valley goes to African-Americans. Why is this? 

One of the answers that the documentary suggests is the fact that black communities don’t encourage tech start ups. Wayne Sutton who is the co-founder of NewMe Accelerator said-

“The African-American community is like, ‘Oh, nobody is going to give you money to make a website… It’s almost like stupid, or not cool.”

Vivek Wadhwa, a mentor and millionaire investor for the NewMe Accelerator also added saying in the documentary-

“Can I be critical about the [black] community?…. You folks don’t help each other.”

The fact of the matter is, under-represented minorities just don’t meet the criteria.  Many investors use a pattern of a white, young, male, computer science graduate from an elite University to decide who they are going to invest in. But successful entrepreneur Steve Stout disagrees saying-

“As African-Americans we need to accept that in most circumstances we have to over-deliver and believe that that’s the reality we are facing today.”

GlobalGrind got the opportunity to ask host Soledad O’Brien if she thought race mattered after having completed the documentary, she told us-

“I think it’s multifactorial. I think that certainly the experience for the 8 people in the house, this accelerator house, is that race did matter.

Whether it was the advice they were getting from mentors saying ‘Find a White guy to front your company; that’s a good way to be successful’ or Wayne getting arrested as he walked home… There’s no party atmosphere so when Wayne is almost arrested because he’s unfamiliar in the neighborhood.

I think that gives a lot of people a lot of insight into the experience of being someone who doesn’t seem to belong in the community.”

There’s no question of whether or not race plays a role in getting a start up Internet Company funded, but the whole notion of Silicon Valley being a place that focuses strictly on merit is nonsense.

The numbers just don’t add up, how can only 1 percent of blacks getting venture investments? It’s ridiculous.

Needless to say, we still must take some responsibility of our own by actually pursuing entrepreneurship and with the drive to over-deliver as Steve Stout pointed out. 

The documentary puts a microscope on an industry that isn’t diverse and shows why.