You've cherrypicked definitions of segregation and ghetto. I'll repeat the original definition that dictionary.com provided:

> put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group

And here's a merriam webster definition of segregation:

> the separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area

Does, or does your proposal not put or restrict minorities to certain projects and teams?

Does, or does your proposal not separate or isolate minorities into restricted teams?

As for your cherrypicked definitions:

>which does not appropriately describe a team that is mixed and where some members come from one or more minorities

It does if those minorities are prevented from accessing other teams (or even if it is just more difficult).

>Which for the same reasons does not properly describe the proposal.

Replace the word 'city' with 'company' and it absolutely does!

>I strongly disagree. You have to respect the human in the equation if you want to facilitate inclusion, and make sure that you do everything to facilitate the change you desire. Otherwise you risk filtering for people that check the right boxes that happen to be similar to the people already working there.

This is irrelevant to whether or not your proposal is essentially segregation. Like I'd previously said, this may make it segregation that you feel is scientifically backed, and morally better than what we are doing now, but that doesn't make it not a form of segregation. You appear to believe that if something is better than the system we have now, it cannot be segregation, and that view just doesn't make any sense at all.

>It is a tool that should only be applied at discretion and when appropriate, and to make it work it needs support.

This is a cop out. It basically can basically be rephrased as "we should only use segregation when it makes sense". If you want to make that argument, that's fine, but its still segregation.

I made some clearer objections in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092706, and you handwaved them away. In essence, when faced with objections to this proposal, your response has been either "I don't like your words" or "yes you have to be judicious and thoughtful when using this strategy", but that just handwaves any of the potential problems away behind magic "judicial and thoughtful"ness. Unless you can craft a strategy beyond the vague "judicious and thoughtful" one you've proposed that materially prevents this proposal from descending into a form of segregation and causing outcomes like the one I suggested previously and will repeat here:

> I'm sorry, we don't have any $minority teams working on $area_of_expertise right now, so I don't see a good fit for you.

I will continue to call your proposal exactly what it is: a strategy of segregating minorities into minority-majority teams in an effort to reduce some of the negative effects of being a minority.

Now to change gears a bit: note that I've never said that this strategy is morally wrong, only that it is a form segregation. You appear to resist that characterization, my goal here has been to show why there are flaws in alternative approaches to affirmative action, and why any such policy is going to be easy to characterize in an unpalatable way.

In other words, while I do personally disagree with your proposal, I was taking on a bit of a devil's advocate stance. In the same way that you find it very easy to attack affirmative action policies as a form of "reverse racism", its pretty easy to similarly attack your majority-minority team proposal as segregation. You seemed to take this very personally, and I apologize for that.

And to be clear, I actually think that a slightly less extreme, but similar proposal to yours is a good idea. Namely, softly enforcing teams with minorities having >1 minority to at least alleviate some of the minority threat you get. However this too is flawed, both from the perspective of it doesn't help minorities as much as some proposals, and because it can be easily characterized as a racial quota.

As an aside, there's another flaw in both of these proposals that isn't simply an issue of branding: they don't address the sourcing issue that affirmative action attempts to. Its very hard to have competent minority teams if you have difficulty sourcing competent minorities (and I should clarify that this is not because they can't or don't exist). A lot of the common AA policies try to reduce false negatives or do creative things to source more minority talent, and are still objected to for various reasons.

Edit: It also appears that you're downvoting my comments, since all of my comments deep in threads responding to you are at 0, and most of my others in these threads are positive. If that's not the case, do let me know, but it makes me uninterested in continuing this discussion with you.