"It is not that there are inequalities because there are racial divisions in the US, but the other way around - racial divisions are created by class divisions." (Wojtek)
^^^
In terms of classes, race in the U.S. is not hard to understand. Race, especially the Black race in the U.S., is the historical remainder, the result of the more ramified or complex class system that existed in the U.S. when there was both slave labor and wage"slave"-labor simultaneously, if you want a historical materialist idea of race. Superstructure often lags changes in infrastructure. Sometimes by many generations. So, in this sense racist divisions were created originally by class divisions. But then the racist divisions take on a social and historical life of their own, and become an independent or co-dependent variable , in your multivariable analysis, causing inequality on their own.
Just because the racist divisions are socially constructed and not biological does not mean that they are not there or will just go away because somebody doesn't like to admit they are there, denies them etc. , that they just end with the passage of time ("how could the same patterns be there 140 years after slavery was abolished?"). They have to be consciously rooted out and affirmatively deactivated - even more than the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. There has to be a special struggle against them within the larger working class movement.
Bush's time as paramount U.S. leader is used to do the opposite, of course: Reinscribe and reinforce racist ideology in white people and including by treating Black people materially and symbolically as inferior and second or third _class_ Americans.
So, Kanye West is so right on it's not funny. What he is saying is obviously true, been true, important to keep saying, whatever.
Charles