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 an 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.
“The COVID-19 pandemic also revealed once again that black people have poor access to healthy food and qualified healthcare services, and their housing conditions are very challenging.
“Also find challenging is educational opportunities much fewer than those of whites just because of their colours 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.
A white teenager, Kyle Rittenhouse was welcomed as a guest of honour at a Republican event, after he shot dead two men at an anti-racism protest.
But Rittenhouse was found not guilty of reckless homicide Doster said the case was a perfect example of the enormous inequalities in the U.S..
“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 polarisation and gun lobbies 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 U.S., 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.