When I was an engineer I definitely felt the artificial distance between me (a human being) and a large group of other human beings serving me who were treated far worse than me. I did not think of them as lesser people, but the system certainly treated them as such.
When I was homeless I definitely felt the being ignored (or seen as a nuisance) by higher-class people. It's very obvious how people's behavior toward you changes when they see you walk out of a tent camp on the street. Actually, it's not just being ignored when people create artificial complaints about your group to get the police to brutally displace you.
Everything is complex of course, it's not black and white, there are spectrums in many dimensions. IMHO the point is to try looking at things from a new perspective and maybe notice things you didn't notice before, that feel wrong. It helps for people with power to notice things that are wrong, since then they can become impassioned to change things.