it’s helpful concept. dialectical materialism aims to do analysis by looking at how the real world affects our ideas and how our ideas affect the real world (the dialogue or dialectic between the two). On a society-wide level, Marxists identify a “base” (material conditions - how production is organized, who lives where, etc) and a “superstructure” (corollary ideas). We think that the base primarily influences the superstructure, not the other way around (“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”). For instance, in capitalism we have ideas like “meritocracy”, and these take hold as popular ways to understand the material conditions of economic disparity. Often the superstructure lingers after the material conditions have changed. For instance racism originally came into prominence to justify the chattel slave trade of Africans. Now chattel slavery is gone, but those racist ideas persist and affect the base, which changes the ideas, etc. Another example is how religion changed as capitalism developed: as the church lost power over society, Christianity developed the idea of a personal relationship with God instead of one mediated through the church. (And then there’s the Anglican split which is more explicit.)

so discrimination against ND people like you’ve experienced is real, and it’s easier for an individual to get ahead if they look NT/white/male/etc, BUT the structural existence of that discrimination is a result of economic conditions. it’s not that someone sat down and said let’s organize society so the jobs have payscales according to the identities of the workers. It’s that society is laid out in a way that works for capitalists, and the ideology of what’s “normal” springs up to defend/explain/enforce the existing order. The many changes in American non-black racism to fit changing economic conditions provide great examples, e.g. How the Irish Became White.