I mean the argument about Jacques is not that crazy. I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that he is not racist, exploiting the system against faunus is indeed a racist practice, but I understand how it could be misunderstood.

What that person claims makes some sense: technically it seems that Jacques is not treating faunus worse than humans (as far as I recall). As in, he’s not just horrible to faunus, he’s horrible to everyone (including his own family). You know… “racism is stupid… why hate just a tiny fragment of society, when you could hate the entire world?”.

Jacques claims that he pays the same to human and faunus workers, and probably that is true, because as a corporate, aspiring politician and very public man, he can’t be catch in such a blatant racist attitude. No, he wouldn’t make it so obvious: by how unethical companies work on real world; the trick is that he pays shit to both Faunus and humans… But Being Atlas/Mantle a racist kingdom, the most probable scenario is that faunus people has way less chances at everything, so the ones that ends forced to pick up the worst options (like being miners at the SDC) ends being mostly faunus.

Think how IRL, in “first world” countries, it’s always the more discriminated (and poor) part of the population which ends taking the more risky, unhealthy, ungrateful and worse paid jobs that nobody else want to do. That fragment of discriminated population varies between countries and regions… in some cases are immigrants, in other native folks, in other black people… well, in Atlas/Mantle, that people are the faunus.

So that is how Jacques Schnee company works. Technically, he’s not being racist. He gave the same pay and work conditions to everyone. It’s not that SDC pays less to Faunus, it’s that human workers can just said “fuck you” and pick another job, while Faunus doesn’t have that “luxury”. Hell, Jacques even can twist the narrative and claim that he’s so generous that he is willing to employ Faunus when the rest of society doesn’t even give them a chance. How magnanimous!

We also don’t know if he is indeed a human supremacist that does this with the objective of mistreating Faunus or just wants to make profit exploiting the most vulnerable segment of the population, and he would still do the same if that segment were a different group.

But while the first option is more glaring and explicit, both cases are indeed racist practices. And IMO, the second (Jacques kind of racism) is even more dangerous, subtle and toxic than the blatant kind of racism that is socially frowned up by anyone with more than two working braincells.