They discovered that class affiliations were trumped by family, religion, and country. 

That's wrong way to think about class, within religion you have the power structure separated by class (vicar, priest Bishop etc) same within a country or even to some degree a family as parents SHOULD have more authority over their kids. It's all about power structures and the problem about the US is they are perpetuating a lie that it's based on race for the difference in power, not factors such as nepotism and ideology.

Yeah, those racial disparities are very real, but they sure as hell aren’t caused by “class”.

No it's class, and they're very open about it if you listen about it. They want the Latin migrants to be their new surfs at the bottom picking their fruit just as the blacks should be dependent on the welfare state in their eyes. This has little to do with race as they would LOVE to do this to whites and Asians too. The problem is that with Asians they are hyper aware of class so push their children to positions of class mobility (Doctors, engineers etc) and with whites it's harder because of previous generations left Europe to escape being locked in a working class and wanted to move up by coming to America. It takes time to slowly erode that spirt and they've been working diligently to do just that.