The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry.
Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination.
You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.
You're conflating hiring discrimination with a broad and nebulous notion of inequality. Everyone agrees that equality is a good idea, but it doesn't map to your notion of how to address hiring discrimination, if such a thing exists. You're proposing deliberate and harmful inequality in the name of fixing some perceived other inequality. It doesn't work.
The way to create equality is to manipulate on levers that individuals can control, e.g. taxation brackets, education incentives, government investment into particular industries. Passing up the best candidate for a job because they didn't have some inherent unchangeable attributes that you're arbitrarily favouring is the opposite of creating equality.
This assumes that there is always a clearly best candidate. Fwiw actual quotas are illegal for this reason, but are you saying that all else equal, hire the less well represented person is discriminatory in a negative fashion?
The historical discrimination did not originate from people saying "yes discriminate against me in the interests of general equality". In fact, to return to the start of this thread: historically much discrimination was the result of bigotry. It's very unlikely that hiring quotas (or similar) are the result of bigotry.
Your conclusion also doesn't follow at all, at least not without some argumentative work that you haven't presented. Suffice to say that I believe that the best way to, in the long term, eliminate discrimination is to allow some specific forms now, with the intent of undoing past discrimination.
You haven't presented even a shadow of an argument as to why that isn't reasonable.