Originally a comment by Ben Finney on Repainting the break room.
If you accept that there weren’t any complaints – and you explicitly do – what is there to excuse?
This is the same defense used by people who act completely surprised when yet another courtroom is found to have exclusive Christian symbolism in it. Oh, no one complained so far, so why would you expect anyone to have done anything about it?!
It’s bullshit for the same reason: The fact that such depictions express the attitude that some people are deserving of unequal treatment by the institution.
No complaint is needed for the institution’s management to know that this depiction expresses that attitude to anyone who comes in. They are responsible for getting rid of it, even if no-one complains.
Are the management supposed to be fucking clairvoyant or something?
They’re supposed to treat everyone equally no matter their religion, sex, ethnicity, etc. That extends to expressing that, and removing expressions that say otherwise.
This is true whether we’re talking about an expression like a Ten Commandments monument which expresses that Abrahamic-religion-followers will be treated specially well, or a huge mural expressing that women are sex objects.
We don’t need anyone to complain about the expression for the management to know this. They should show they’re part of a progressive society and remove these harmful displays before any complaint.
I still can’t get over that XXX-rated mural. W. T. F.
“What’s that, good sir? You say that you object to the fact that I am standing upon your face? Well, I suppose that now that you object, I might prevail upon myself to move elsewhere.
I don’t know what’s wrong with you hippy SJW anti-face standers, though. You seem to expect everyone else to magically be ultra-sensitive to any tiny little thing that might inconvenience you. What kind of fucking clairvoyant is supposed to be able to realize that a person might object to having his face stood upon? You really need to make an effort to spell these things out to people like me — after all, we’ve got much more important things to worry about, most of which are happening somewhere very far away and which we are unable to influence. We’re completely incapable of figuring these things out unless you explain them.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of all the many things wrong with you, why do you have to always be complaining all the time? It’s not like we haven’t heard everything you’ve got to say ten million times.”
Institutional inequality is often not complained about because those complaints are invariably treated unequally. This isn’t bloody hard to figure out. You’d think a bunch of doctors could’ve understood at least that much.