The Assimilation of Differences
The term “inclusion” has become one of the most celebrated ideals in modern institutional discourse. Schools champion it as a core principle. Corporations devote resources to diversity and inclusion teams. Government policies are drafted in its name. The word has taken on a moral status, suggesting that progress and justice are advancing in tandem. Yet beneath this language of openness lies a deeper and more troubling reality.
The way inclusion is currently practiced often serves to reinforce, rather than disrupt, the very structures that generated exclusion in the first place. Its intention may be benevolent, but its implementation is frequently tethered to systems that were never designed to accommodate genuine difference. These systems, which have been shaped by industrial, colonial, and bureaucratic values, prioritize control, standardization, and efficiency above all else. Within such frameworks, human variation is treated as a disruption to manage instead of a feature to embrace.
As a result, inclusion becomes conditional. People are welcomed only if they conform to preexisting norms of behavior, communication, and productivity. Neurodivergent students may be admitted into mainstream classrooms, yet only if they manage to suppress the behaviors that mark their divergence. Employees from marginalized communities may gain access to institutions, but only if they learn to navigate dominant cultural codes without disturbing established hierarchies. The message is clear: difference is acceptable, but only in its most legible, managed, or quiet form.
Even the accommodations offered in good faith often carry this logic. Modified tasks, flexible scheduling, or tailored learning plans all suggest responsiveness, but they rarely question the structures that define the original standard. Instead of rethinking how time, value, or performance are defined, these efforts simply allow individuals to adjust themselves more efficiently to an unchanged system. The baseline remains intact, while the burden of adaptation falls on those at the margins.
This model of inclusion is not just structurally limited, but also performative. Institutions have become adept at signaling progress without enacting it. They produce mission statements, diversity reports, and visual representations of multiculturalism that project the appearance of change. However, the underlying architecture often remains immune to critique. Inclusion becomes a kind of symbolic currency that can be exchanged for legitimacy and moral authority, even when substantive transformation is absent.
Those who continue to question these dynamics are often recast as ungrateful, uncooperative, or excessively critical. Their discomfort is then conveniently reframed as resistance and their dissent is pathologized. Institutions, having performed their ethical duty, now demand compliance. The critique is absorbed, neutralized, and redirected. In such a context, inclusion functions more as a mechanism for maintaining stability than an entry point for change.
A Systemic Design of Exclusion
To move beyond this impasse, the question must shift. Rather than asking how more individuals can be included within existing systems, a more urgent inquiry is required: what would it take to reimagine the systems themselves?
Inclusion should not mean asking individuals to adapt to environments built around sameness. It should mean building environments that center plurality from the start.
There are already models that offer insight into this shift. Universal Design for Learning, for example, assumes cognitive and sensory variation as a foundational premise rather than an anomaly to accommodate. Indigenous governance structures often emphasize relationality, contextual knowledge, and consensus, standing in contrast to the procedural rigidity of Western bureaucracies. These are not peripheral alternatives. They represent viable frameworks for structural redesign, grounded in respect for difference as generative rather than disruptive.
Resistance to such approaches is common and is often framed in pragmatic terms—efficiency, feasibility, or coherence. However, these concerns typically emerge from an underlying discomfort with the loss of normative control. Systems built on predictability do not easily accommodate uncertainty. They function by minimizing variation, and therefore treat deep change as risk rather than opportunity.
Pathologization plays a central role in sustaining these dynamics. By defining divergence through diagnostic or behavioral categories, institutions legitimize the perception that difference must be treated, corrected, or mitigated. Individuals are permitted to participate only after being filtered through clinical or institutional classifications that reframe their existence as a problem to solve. In such cases, inclusion is no longer an act of welcome; it becomes an act of control.
This logic is not limited to formal diagnoses. Cultural and communicative differences are also read through normative lenses. Emotional intensity may be seen as instability. Silence may be mistaken for disengagement. Directness may be interpreted as aggression. These judgments reflect deeply embedded assumptions about what counts as professional, rational, or appropriate. When inclusion efforts fail to interrogate these assumptions, they simply reproduce the structures they claim to critique.
A more honest and transformative approach begins with epistemic humility. It requires institutions to recognize that their standards, categories, and practices are not neutral or universal. They are shaped by histories of exclusion, systems of power, and culturally specific values. Reimagining inclusion means questioning how knowledge is defined, how competence is measured, and how value is assigned.
This shift also demands a redefinition of design principles. Systems must be created as frameworks that emerge from the full range of human experience and not as retrofits for the few. Instead of viewing divergence as a flaw to be accommodated, it must be seen as the foundation for new forms of organization, learning, and collaboration.
Moving Beyond Inclusion
Inclusion, in this context, becomes inseparable from structural redesign.
The failure to make this transition carries a cost. When inclusion remains tethered to conditional access and symbolic gestures, it risks becoming a sophisticated mode of exclusion. It invites people in but asks them to leave key parts of themselves at the door. It acknowledges the presence of difference without committing to the work of transformation. In doing so, it protects the center by reshaping the margin rather than questioning the line between them.
What is required now is not more inclusion as currently defined, but a deeper commitment to institutional self-examination and structural reimagination. The question is no longer whether individuals can be welcomed into the norm. The question is whether the norm itself is worth preserving. Until systems are willing to become different in order to include difference, inclusion will remain a managed contradiction. Liberation begins when institutions stop asking how to include the Other, and begin asking how to design worlds in which no one is rendered Other to begin with.
Preprint Paper: Inclusion as Compliance
For more details, read the preprint paper here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15450425