This is such an important point to remember. There is a fine and important nuance between
"This negative thing exists to create the conditions of oppression"
"This negative thing exists for somewhat unrelated reasons, but it is being used and intensified by people and institutions which benefit from creating conditions of oppression even though they may or may not actually adhere to the underlying motivator for that specific negative thing"
In A Peoples History of the United States Howard Zinn argues that the institutionalization of racism and discrimination in the legal code and in sentencing stemmed from a desire of the moneyed elite to prevent the solidification of the labour class by creating a division structurally between Black and other colonists and early Americans, and also to specifically curtail the spread of anti-slavery sentiment among white labour who were also being exploited - though significantly less severely so - by the money elite.
But vital to this analysis is that racism and the institution of slavery preexisted this codification of disparate punishments (including more severe punishment for engaging in 'criminality' in company with Black individuals specifically).
Yes - the slave owning plantation class and the ruling class more general all benefited from exploiting the behaviour of racism and the structure of slavery. But racism predated both that exploitation and the structure of slavery and developed from a lot of root sources ranging from "human brains are wired to be suspicious of people who do not look like the people we grew up with" to "historically, and especially in the various pre-scientific ages, communities had to directly and often violently compete over limited critical resources in such a manner that cultural norms about discrimination and the out group were both universal in the human experience and most readily expressed against visually obvious physical characteristics which in the afro-european confluence was most clearly skin colour"
And we see this now. Why does Jensen Huang want the US to continue its war in Iran? Because it makes him richer and more powerful. Does Jensen Huang support Zionism, American Imperialism, anti-Persian bigotry, Islamaphobia, or any of a number of co-factors in this war? Probably not - but he doesn't care. Those structural injustices do not exist because Jensen Huang wants to be rich, or because men like Jensen Huang wish to be rich. They are merely a set of existing behaviours which he and others like him can capitalize on to be rich.
None of those behaviours exists to prop up capitalism. No - not even American Imperialism. They exist for complex multi-factor reasons. But they are exploited to prop up capitalism. They are the convenient tool of capitalist oppression. They are also forms of oppression in theirselves, and they exploit capitalist system to prop theirselves up too. But the key factor is this: if the oppressor can benefit, they will use whatever behaviour, belief, or tool is at hand.
This is why intersectionality matters. Often, intersectionality reveals both the common abusers of oppressive systems - the Military Industrial Complex, the Billionaire Class, etc. - as well as highlighting the diverse root causes of those systems. And both need addressing.
Islamiphobia exists in its current severe state in the US in part because of 9/11 and the weaponisation of that event politically. And 9/11 happened because of US foreign policy in the near east. And that policy was shaped and pushed by Zionism and political convenience, and by Zionism exploiting political convenience, during the Cold War. And that stemmed in part from hostility to the Soviet Union - which was intertwined with, but in important ways distinct from, capitalist panic about socialism. And so on and so forth
The demonization of Iran and her people happens because people who are pursuing rapacious capitalism, and people who are racist/Islamaphobic bigots, and people who are Zionist Ethno-Nationalists all benefit from it. But they are also exploiting a pre-existing skepticism and mistrust about 'different', 'foreign', and 'other' cultures and things. And they are all exploiting each other.
But that is three separate groups and motivations which are exploiting the same behaviour, and that behaviour already existed and emerged from a history of events that coalesced into the current moment.
I can tell you now - those events did not happen in order to create the conditions for those three factions to align. The West did not prop up the Shah because people like Jensen Huang might want to one day access the Iranian market to prop up their fortunes which are currently inflated by an AI bubble they are desperately attempting to sustain.
They did it to ensure political control of oil resources during the cold war, because their leaders were friends with oil executives, because their 'Christian' and Western cultural norms devalued Iran's Islamic and Persian ones, because it was a legacy of empires, and because the people making the choices had no direct understanding of the reality on the ground or the likely consequences.
And vitally, we are seeing that this is becoming in some important ways harder for the oppressor to exploit because most common people, when surrounded with generally true information about their fellow humans - assuming they are not already invested in some form of negative behaviour - do not incline towards hostile patterns of action. And that is why remembering the first point is important. Because if you assume that the behaviour exists to prop up the oppression, you forget to actually treat the behaviour as well and instead assume that your can get rid of it by targeting the oppressive system - which just leaves it there to be exploited by the next person. The behaviour is not a symptom. It is not a cause. It is its own separate diagnosis which requires its own separate engagement and treatment.
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