"Protected people" whitewashes Dhimmitude's oppressive reality for all but the most elite members of religious minorities who rose to high levels of wealth and government service. Even they lived with an insecurity their Muslim counterparts didn't. Inferior legal status meant that Dhimmis always lived at the mercy of arbitrary state power.

Physical separation in a ghetto, which was not codified in law in the US, is also not a precondition for racial or religious apartheid — a caste system. Jews in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris in 1940-45 were also never isolated within the physical boundaries of a ghetto. The Dalit in India's caste system aren't physically separated either. This description of the conditions lived by the enserfed Dhimmi Jews in southern Morocco in 1884 was replicated by the Dalit in India and blacks in the American South:

“In 1884 Charles de Foucauld described areas in southern Morocco where the Jews and their families belonged body and soul to their Muslim master and were unable to leave him. As late as 1913, the Jews of Dadès in the Greater Atlas of Morocco were serfs, the property of their Muslim master.”

Bernard Lewis, in his The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years, describes the dhimmi system's malevolent reality:

"The basis of this contract was the recognition by the dhimmîs of the supremacy of Islam and the dominance of the Muslim state, and their acceptance of a position of subordination, symbolized by certain social restrictions and by the payment of a poll tax (jizya) to which Muslims were not subject....The dhimmîs were thus significantly better situated than slaves, but in important respects worse off than free Muslims....Dhimmis remained, however, inferior, and were not allowed to forget their inferiority. They could not testify before Muslim courts, and like slaves and women they counted for less than Muslims in matters of compensation for injury. They were not free to marry Muslim women under pain of death, though Muslim men were free to marry Christian or Jewish women. They were subject to restrictions on their dress, on which they were required to wear distinguishing signs; their mounts - they were not allowed to ride horses, but only donkeys or mules; and their places of worship — according to the law, they could repair old ones but not build new ones. Although these restrictions were not always strictly enforced, they could always be invoked."

From Bat Ye’or’s The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam:

“b) Jizya. In addition to the kharāj, the adult male dhimmi had to pay a poll tax, the jizya (Qur’ān 9:29). According to some jurists, this poll tax was to be paid by each person individually at a humiliating public ceremony in which the dhimmi, while paying it, was struck either on the head or on the nape of the neck. Possession of the receipt for the jizya — originally a piece of parchment worn around the neck or a seal worn on the wrist or on the chest — enabled the dhimmi to move from place to place. A dhimmi travelling without this receipt could be put in jail.”

The outcome: perpetual insecurity and living at the mercy of external arbitrary power, which made periodic outbreaks of mob violence and extortion by rulers inevitable:

“At various times, Jews in Muslim lands were able to live in relative peace and thrive culturally and economically. The position of the Jews was never secure, however, and changes in the political or social climate would often lead to persecution, violence and death. Jews were generally viewed with contempt by their Muslim neighbors; peaceful coexistence between the two groups involved the subordination and degradation of the Jews. When Jews were perceived as having achieved too comfortable a position in Islamic society, anti-Semitism would surface, often with devastating results: On December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, Spain, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. The riot was incited by Muslim preachers who had angrily objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power. Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in “an offensive manner.” The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.(6) Other mass murders of Jews in Arab lands occurred in Morocco in the 8th century, where whole communities were wiped out by Muslim ruler Idris I; North Africa in the 12th century, where the Almohads either forcibly converted or decimated several communities; Libya in 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews; Algiers, where Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830 and Marrakesh, Morocco, where more than 300 hundred Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880.(7) Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293–4, 1301–2), Iraq (854–859, 1344) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran’s prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790–92) and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).(8)”

One look at where in the Muslim world Dhimmitude and the jizya poll tax are reimposed tells you how the innocuous "protected people" whitewashes the reality. From the jizya wikipedia page:

"The jizya is no longer imposed by Muslim states.[38][172] Nevertheless, there have been reports of non-Muslims in areas controlled by the Pakistani Taliban and ISIS being forced to pay the jizya.[37][41]” In 2009, officials in the Peshawar region of Pakistan claimed that members of the Taliban forced the payment of jizya from Pakistan's minority Sikh community after occupying some of their homes and kidnapping a Sikh leader.[226] In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) announced that it intended to extract jizya from Christians in the city of Raqqa, Syria, which it controlled. Christians who refused to pay the tax would have to either convert to Islam or die. Wealthy Christians would have to pay the equivalent of USD $664 twice a year; poorer ones would be charged one-fourth that amount.[41] In June, the Institute for the Study of War reported that ISIL claims to have collected the fay, i.e. jizya and kharaj..."

The Muslim reaction to the abolition of Dhimma in Egypt by their French conquerors in the 1790s also reveals Muslim status-metering panic at seeing the removal of dominance they viewed as their birthright, eerily similar to American white supremacists' reaction to federal intervention against segregation during the civil rights movement. From Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong:

"This may help to explain the very sharp Muslim reaction against them. Even the contemporary Egyptian historian al-Jabart by, in general an open-minded observer willing to recognize some of the positive aspects of French rule, comments very negatively on the emancipation and employment of Copts in what was tantamount to a termination of the dhimma. He was particularly offended by their wearing fine clothes and bearing arms, contrary to old established usage, their exercising authority over the affairs and even the persons of the Muslims, and generally acting in a way that in his eyes was a reversal of the proper order of things as established by the law of God. While al-Jabart shows only modified enthusiasm in welcoming the return of Ottoman authority, he rejoices particularly in the restoration of the dhimma and of the restrictions it imposed on his Coptic compatriots."

No Egyptian Copt, Iraqi Yazidi, Iranian Bahai or Iraqi Christian would agree with your whitewashed benign description of Dhimma, which is equivalent to a Gone With The Wind type view of how American blacks viewed their lot under Jim Crow or the view of Theresienstadt the Nazis tried to show their Red Cross visitors in 1944.