I wish it were so simple as "Just forget about it." as you suggest, but its not. Thats like saying "Ignore the splinter in your eye and it will clear up.
You have just once agian demonstrated your (well intentioned) lack of understanding of the situation. I know you think you understand, but you dont and I don have the energy to disect the whole problem back 400 years to show it to you. It wouldnt do any good anyway since you (al) know it all and are apparently, un teachable. Your loss, and if afact all of our loss because with your position the problem will only exacerbate until it explodes...as it is fixing to do.
Maggot out.
I'm always up for a good reading and I'd be very interested to read you dissection of the problems for the past 400 years as I always find it interesting to read other viewpoints and discuss them.
I find debating your ideas with other ideas helps either strengthen them, or revise them to ones with a more concrete foundation, so I'm usually up for that.
My main focus is that you can't endlessly (or so it seems) try to makeup for things done in the past which were the way they were done in the past but are horribly wrong these days.
You especially can't expect anything but ill feelings if you run endless programs which disadvantage people who didn't do anything wrong just because of their race, in order to promote somebody else because of their race to achieve some non specific percentage that will make somebody? feel good?
A more modern comparison might be the previous persecution & marginalization of people who enjoy physical relations with their same gender. Previously discrimination of those people was the law until the law was changed and now many more than before view it as a human right & many more now agree that it's a matter of birth and not choice. (And some still disagree)
Should the police forces and military go on an affirmative action campaign to make sure there are enough leadership slots filled by openly same sex attracted officers to correct the previous open discrimination of them before, or is it best to do as is the current policy, to simply say we drew a line, the past is past and now who you choose to be physically attracted to is not allowed to be used either for or against you & everyone is judged on the same merits.
Set asides in hiring, education, business etc are by their very nature exclusionary, as in "You can't get this slot because you are the wrong race" so it by it's stated purpose continues the perception of problems based on race. To ask if it's fair for current people you'd have to see would it be okay with everybody if it was exactly reversed? If not, then it's not fair to somebody & if it's not fair to somebody, then you are breeding more anger.
Discrimination based on Race (of a darker shade of skin) has been illegal for just about half a century in this country. You will be hard pressed to find people currently applying to join the workforce who were legally oppressed. (Illegally oppressed still happens but is stamped out quickly every time it is brought to court).
(Race in of itself being a bit of a misnomer in this country were a large part of the population are quite mixed and it's really more of a which shade of color are you.
For example President Obama was pretty much exactly 1/2 Caucasian and 1/2 Kenyan, but because the shade of his skin was darker he was identified as being one race based on skin shade only, however based on genes, there is a very good chance one of his grandchildren comes out a much lighter shade of skin color. So technically in liberal speak, Obama was half oppressor and half oppressed). So if for example one of Obama's grandchildren came out very light skin colored is it fine to reverse discriminate against them and say your siblings can have dedicated slots in xxx but not you as you are too light colored? Even most lighter skinned people have a wide variety of mix in their genetic makeup.
On my end my stance is that simply the only way forward is everybody has to compete equally based on ability, merit and other qualifications that apply equally regardless of your race, gender, creed or orientation, unless there is some highly specific need for a narrowing based on that due to only a certain subset being able to do it. This will probably anger some who feel they should have a more than equal chance based on things that happened to others, but that's just the way it has to be unless we want to be stuck in the same spot forever.
So I would be very interested to hear what your solution would be that would be explicitly fair to everyone, as in it passes the both ways test and leaves nobody feeling they were discriminated against? What's the start and end time, end goal specifically in numbers and details etc?