If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white?
The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people don't want to join, I would say that's a good candidate. But it isn't a good thing in and of itself, and shouldn't be an ongoing thing. Because it's corrosive in its own right.
I would rather Google/apple/Amazon put effort into education if they feel there's an issue. I would guess the issue is one of poverty rather than colour per se. Targeting and helping schools in poor areas would actually be helping where it mattered, giving people the best start in life whatever their colour, rather than someone who already had that start, but happens not to be white.
Quotas are a straw/boogeyman. Most companies have hiring targets. The difference is that quotas must be filled (which doesn't make business or social sense) whereas hiring targets are goals (which aren't required to be attained).
Except those "targets" are often tied to things like pay and promotion. That really blurs the line between "quota" and "target". For example Intel docked people's pay unless they hit their totally-not-a-quota target of 40% women and URM hires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679982
Diversity quotas are wrong.
If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white?
The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people don't want to join, I would say that's a good candidate. But it isn't a good thing in and of itself, and shouldn't be an ongoing thing. Because it's corrosive in its own right.
I would rather Google/apple/Amazon put effort into education if they feel there's an issue. I would guess the issue is one of poverty rather than colour per se. Targeting and helping schools in poor areas would actually be helping where it mattered, giving people the best start in life whatever their colour, rather than someone who already had that start, but happens not to be white.