When Taking Down the Flag Feels Safer Than Keeping It Up

By Sam Stimpson with a bit of help from Claude! Image credit: Unsplash

A client asked me a question last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

They'd taken their Pride colours down this year and they wanted to know if that had been a mistake.

Their reasoning wasn't apathy. They'd watched the same pattern play out in organisations for years. Flags go up for the month or week, black squares appear, purple hearts get added to a bio for a week and then nothing changes.

No policy shifts. No investment. No accountability. Just a symbol, doing the work a culture was supposed to do. They didn't want to be one more organisation doing that. So they went quiet instead while the assessed what they should do.

I understand the instinct. Virtue signalling (symbols with no substance behind them) is corrosive. It teaches the people the symbol is supposed to represent that visibility is cheap and conditional: that it shows up when it's convenient and disappears the moment there's a cost attached. It also hands ammunition to anyone looking for a reason to dismiss inclusion work as theatre rather than substance.

But here's what I said to my client, and what I want to say more widely: taking the flag down doesn't solve that problem. It just makes it invisible.

The symbol was never the risk

Virtue signalling isn't dangerous because a symbol exists. It's dangerous when the symbol replaces the work. The flag going up is never the problem using the flag and not doing anything else is.

So when an organisation takes it down to avoid virtue signalling, the fear of scrutiny hasn't gone away. What's gone is the one visible cue that might prompt someone to ask, "so what are you actually doing?"

Three questions before you decide

If you're wrestling with the same decision, whether to raise a flag, keep one flying, or take one down, ask these three questions first, whichever way you're leaning:

●       If someone asked "what have you done this year to back this up?", could you answer in under thirty seconds? If the answer is genuinely yes, policy, budget, hiring, something that outlives the campaign, the symbol is doing what it's supposed to. Pointing at something real. If the answer is a pause, that's worth sitting with, regardless of what you decide about the flag.

●       Would the people the symbol represents notice if it disappeared? Not "would anyone complain" would the actual day-to-day experience of your LGBTQ+ colleagues, disabled colleagues, or colleagues of colour change in any way if the visible signal vanished tomorrow? If the answer is no, it was decoration either way.

●       Are you removing the flag, or removing the accountability? Be honest with yourself about which one you're actually protecting against.

Visibility is not the enemy of authenticity

This lands at a genuinely interesting moment. July is Disability Pride Month and this year's theme is visibility, intersectionality and disabled leadership, a reminder that for a lot of communities being seen at all has never been guaranteed, and retreating from visibility the moment it gets uncomfortable is its own kind of message.

The organisations people trust aren't the loudest ones in the calendar months. They're the ones where what you see on the outside and what happens on the inside would tell you roughly the same story whichever one you asked.

The client hadn't made an unreasonable decision. They'd made a nervous one, in a climate that makes nervousness understandable and a decision to be authentic and ensure substance behind their signals.

The flag was never the thing to fix. The gap behind it was.