Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-76.98.160.12-20150930101212/@comment-25555436-20150930225724

ChishioKunrin wrote: Y'know, it's possible that the reason we've barely seen any blatant racism toward Faunus is because, like Blake said, the White Fang's violent tactics worked and got Humans to treat them like equals out of fear. ....Or, there wasn't any discrimination to speak of in the first place, except for the years that followed the FRR, which obviously couldn't have been just a decade before RWBY begins.

The Faunus became equals to Humans legally, and to almost the same point culturally, at least in some areas. But some members of the WF were butthurt that they got their cake and couldn't eat it. That they were equals instead of being on top of humanity.

So they became violent and started terrorizing the population. And it worked. In other words, they didn't erase the racism, they created it, or rather revived it. There was no big-and-wide discrimination against them anymore, but thanks to their actions, humans now had actual, good, and honest reasons to hate and fear Faunus. Weiss is an example.

It's not that the Faunus were created like dirt even after supposedly being "equals". It's just that the more extreme members of the WF wanted more, and through their actions, they ended up reviving the exact same thing they supposedly were fighting to end.