"People like you" So prejudiced, maybe get that looked at.
It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.
Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.
You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.