Interview: Racism tool for U.S. politicians to pursue "greedy" capitalist interests, says scholar

ISTANBUL, May 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. politicians have been exploiting racism to pursue their "greedy" capitalist interests while encouraging inequalities between races in every sphere of life, a prominent Turkish scholar said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

"White people have privileges over blacks in many domains like courts, political life, private sector and bureaucracy," Baris Doster, a professor of communication and journalism with Istanbul-based Marmara University, told Xinhua.

"The COVID-19 pandemic also revealed once again that black people have poor access to healthy food and qualified healthcare services, their housing conditions are very challenging, and educational opportunities much fewer than those of whites just because of their color from birth," Doster said.

The problem of gun violence in U.S. society, which suffers "a horrendous level of individual armament," has unproportionally affected black Americans, reflecting how the systemic racism plagues the country, the Turkish scholar noted.

Mentioning Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager who was welcomed as a guest of honor at a Republican event after he shot dead two men at an anti-racism protest but was found not guilty of reckless homicide, Doster said the case is a perfect example of the enormous inequalities in the United States.

"The hand that pulls the trigger is usually white. Those who die, are injured, or victims are usually black," he lamented.

According to Doster, the out-of-control gun violence is fuelled by political polarization and gun lobby which puts the profiting of special interest groups above the common good.

"For them owning a gun is not only a right but also a profitable business," he explained.

As the American writer Belen Fernandez has put it, "greedy capitalism" is the institutional force behind worsening social security in the United States, Doster noted.

"It's hard not to agree that the U.S. domestic and foreign policies are fully based on the absolute domination of capital. Capitalism, or the so-called liberalism, wild capitalism, or neoliberalism, have bipartisan support," he said.