My "thing" is that what often gets passes off as diversity and inclusion is actually assimilation.
I like to use the "seat at the table" metaphor. It's been a rectangular table. As diversity and inclusion join, the table should become oval as it progresses towards round. As for a seat at the table? If there's diversity and inclusion some take a chair, some stand, other might sit on the floor. That is, everyone gets a place at the table, but seat isn't forced upon them.
On the other hand, with assimilation nothing really changes. The rectangular table just gets longer and longer, and adds more seats.
All in all, assimilation is the means to the ends of monoculture.
In the complaints about homogenization, people seem to often miss that it's not just marketing and magic US poison. Most of this stuff gets adopted simply because it's better than the local thing it replaced.
To riff off your analogy: the table will remain rectangular and will grow in length for a simple reason: round tables suck. They're good as a metaphor, but are inconvenient and a waste of space in reality. As reflected by their relative rarity.
That's fine. My point is, that's not diversity and inclusion. It's assimilation.
To riff on your riff. There the Groucho Marx’s quote: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” While perhaps he meant it differently, we have people/groups lining up to get a seat at a rectangular table with a history of: bigotry, genocide, misogyny, prejudice, war, greed, cronyism, materialistic, etc, etc, etc.
The new members are so proud of themselves for getting a seat at that table, conveniently ignoring all the unnecessary death, suffering, injustice, etc deeply notched into that table.
I like to use the "seat at the table" metaphor. It's been a rectangular table. As diversity and inclusion join, the table should become oval as it progresses towards round. As for a seat at the table? If there's diversity and inclusion some take a chair, some stand, other might sit on the floor. That is, everyone gets a place at the table, but seat isn't forced upon them.
On the other hand, with assimilation nothing really changes. The rectangular table just gets longer and longer, and adds more seats.
All in all, assimilation is the means to the ends of monoculture.