Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-14909251-20170522044827/@comment-4010415-20170528220312

I view it like this:

Before the Great War

There was a lot of severe and widespread discrimination in the olden days, which we've been told by WoR: Faunus, what with Faunus being avoided, driven out of towns, and hunted down and murdered. WoR: Faunus says that, at one point, there was an incident where the only reason a town survived a Grimm attack was due to Humans and Faunus working together (interestingly, it happened on Sanus), but then after that, Humans used Faunus' differences to exploit them and still alienated them.

Great War & Faunus War

The Faunus War happened either before or after the Great War.

If it was before the Great War: That makes being gifted Menagerie in the Vytal Treaty a little insulting. "Remember that tiny continent we tried to force you all to move to? Have it as a gift. ;)"

If it was after the Great War: That means Faunus being granted equal rights didn't stop Humans from trying to force their entire population into Menagerie.

The White Fang

Blake said the White Fang was founded "in the ashes of war" as a "symbol of peace and unity between Humans and Faunus", though she doesn't state which war. I'm tempted to say that the Faunus War happened decades after the Great War, and the White Fang was founded after the Faunus War ended. Oobleck says it may feel like ancient history to the students but it's a fairly recent event, so if it happened after the Great War, it had to have come to an end decades before the students were born. Come to think of it, why do we assume Ghira founded the White Fang? It's only ever been said that he was the previous leader before Sienna took charge.

At some point after the WF was founded, whether it was months or years, the WF decided they felt that there was still an unnecessary amount of discrimination going on. It wasn't as severe as it used to be, not by a longshot, but it was still enough that they felt it necessary to carry out peaceful protests and boycotts.

When the WF switched leaders, there were shops that were refusing to serve Faunus. That's a pretty good indication, in my mind, that there was still some discrimination going on.

WF began carrying out their violent methods, and due to fear of WF backlash, the discrimination died down even more.

Here's the thing. Just because it's not obvious and public, just because Faunus aren't being lynched or refused service, that does not necessarily mean that discrimination is not present. It's just a lot more minor, it's died down a lot, and it's probably more isolated to certain types of people and groups. Nonetheless, those people and groups affect the lives of Faunus around them.

It's like how there's an argument as to whether or not there's still discrimination toward black people going on in America. The treatment that they face is nowhere near as bad as it used to be - for example, a black man won't get arrested or murdered just for looking at a white woman a certain way. And, of course, black people and white people are no longer segregated.

However, the people who argue that they still face discrimination point to things like the fact that employers are more likely to hire people with white-sounding names than black-sounding names, even if they have the same or similar qualifications. That decision was made based strictly on race and is, therefore, discrimination.

Black people are more often viewed as dangerous, uneducated, criminals, and/or drug-users, and people are more often suspicious of them. There was even a TV show that did social experiments that ended up seeing this happen in one of their episodes. They wanted to see what people would do if a group of teenage boys were visibly destroying a car in an open parking lot in broad daylight. The teenagers that they chose were white. Passersby asked them if it was their car, and when they said yes, they believed them. The only call to the police from that area was from someone who had seen some black teenagers asleep in a car because that person assumed they were lying low and about to do something bad. So, the people behind the TV show wondered "Would things play out differently if the teenagers were black?" They carried out the same experiment with black teenage boys instead, and voila, tons of people called the cops on them and no one asked if the car was theirs.

The attitude that would lead people to assume white teens who are destroying a car aren't committing vandalism, only to call the cops on black teens doing the same thing and, especially, black teens who are just taking a nap, can be seen as discrimination. Does every white person in America have that same attitude? No. Do the vast majority of white people in America have that same attitude? Probably not. But there are still enough who do for it to be something that black people encounter at least once in their lives.

As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't have to come from a grand majority of the population, nor does it have to be as severe as segregation or lynchings, for it to be discrimination.

If Humans' discrimination of Faunus was still affecting a significant amount of Faunus' lives - such as, from Human-owned shops refusing to serve them - then of course they would still be bothered by it and want to take action against it.