Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is demonstrably false that we are in a post class, post racial, and post gender/sex system. The populism we see in the west (more so on the right than left) is a rational reaction to a system that ignores anyone who is not a professional college educated elite.
I think we agree overall. The issue is who this "elite" is. And that's what no one wants to define. I think you can do alright if you put some effort in. Maybe get a degree, maybe get a trade. Maybe start a business. It's not perfect, you'll (as you say) never actually break out of your class of birth. But the opportunity is there. In America, the UK, etc. But people are lazy and short termism is built into humans. S…
It's been said that riots are the voice of people who feel absolutely disempowered. I very much agree, and I think it applies equally well to BLM riots as it does to white working class people voting for Trump. Both are protesting a sense of total political disempowerment and being ignored and left behind, but in different ways.
My favorite quote from the 2016 election was along the lines of "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Trump." A large number of avid Trump supporters viewed him as a human brick to throw through the window of what they view as an elite establishment that is absolutely dismissive of them.
America is classist and Plutocratic more than it is racist. Poor and working class urban blacks and poor and working class rural whites are both underclasses, and the fact that they are poor is more significant than their ethnicity. A wealthy black person, especially if they live in a top-tier city, is quite a bit "whiter" in America than a poor white person.