America is also a pretty classist place, but for me the people you hear saying "it's about class, not race" are mainly working to ignore that America is a pretty racist place. And indeed, part of why it's easy to make that argument is that almost all of America's history involves racial discrimination to create and magnify class distinction. See, e.g.: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

I'd be interested to see how the study you suggest turns out, but I wouldn't expect it to be much different; there's too much other evidence of purely racial bias.

Race and class are tightly bound in America. But there are some things in the study that are at least suggestive that it's a racial difference.

First they attempted to assess names race, and got rid of names that were insufficiently suggestive of race.

The study varied postal addresses and included African American names from richer neighborhoods and whites from poorer neighborhoods, and included both low and high quality resumes. Hypothetically, if people were associating black names with low class more then white names, then there should be a significant difference in the benefits of a "good" neighborhood between whites with a good neighborhood and blacks. There was none.

Further, one would assume that if class was the determining factor, then a better quality of resume might offset this. It did, but to a lesser degree for African American Names... that is, whites got more effect from a better resume then blacks did.

A white name was, by the researchers estimates, the equivalent of an additional eight years of experience for black people.

If being perceived as black, or if names that are predominantly understood as black are sufficient to assign a person to a lower class, I'd argue that that's inherently racial discrimination.