Much to say here Will.
First, to think Kim Crenshaw or any of the crits think racism is natural to humans, implied by your last paragraph here, is absolutely false. CRT actually rejects that notion entirely as does all of modern antiracist thought. No one believes that. Literally no one with any prominence in this work. In fact, we all agree that racism developed largely as a trick to maintain class domination. Bell believed that (I know this because I knew him), Crenshaw definitely does (we're friends), as do the other crits. We all agree that racism came from enslavement, for instance, as a way to rationalize and justify it, rather than the other way around. BTW, that is Kendi's principal argument in Stamped from the Beginning too. It has long been central to antiracist thought, even in the so called identitarian school.
Second, Breunig's formulation is an interesting sleight of hand, as is your claim that class is what you have rather than what you are. Clever but actually questionable socialist theory, whether traditional or neo-Marxist.
Why? Simple. While Bruenig is right that the only way poor people get justice is to no longer be poor--i.e., to be eliminated in the sense of elininating their existing material condition, "poor" is not a class category, unless we wish to simplify class into poor and rich people. Marx did not do this, nor has any Marxist scholar ever done so. Why? Because poverty is a moving target, relative to each nation's economic position, and it is something that varies even within a nation based on median income there at any given time. It also does not necessarily track with one's relationship to the means of production. One can, for instance, make a very decent income but be working class in the sense of not having control over one's labor. For a time, good union jobs made this possible, for instance. So being poor is not a class category in and of itself.
This is why Marx spoke in terms of owning versus working class. And understood that way, Bruenig is being dishonest. Ending the class system is not about ending the working class, it is about empowering them to govern their own production and labor power, workplaces, etc. So, in that sense, class IS who you are, not just what you have. It is about your relation to the means of production. Once workers are empowered under socialism, they don't stop being workers, per se, but they are no longer alientated from their labor the way they were under capitalism. They stop being alienated and exploited labor. In traditional Marxism they become the proletarian dictatorship, however that concept is understood, but they don't become the new bourgeoise. It is the latter that ceases to exist, not the former.
Likewise, if racism were eliminated, Black and brown folks would still be Black or brown but that would no longer have the same meaning, just as being a worker would no longer have the same meaning absent capitalism or some other class system. Both class status and race, and other identities only matter to the extent those statuses have been given meaning in a class system/racialized system of white supremacy/patriarchy, etc. They are more alike than Bruenig or you are allowing, or so it seems.
Ultimately, everyone I know who you think to be an identitiarian, agrees with the race/class nexus you put forward here. My argument, which none of them have ever disagreed with, is that whiteness, for instance, and white privilege were sort of like consolation prizes for the working class "white" person--something given for the reason DuBois noted: as a psychological wage; as a trick. Everyone working on whiteness stuff (Roediger, Goldberg, Lipsitz, Harris and all the crits) agree with that. Where we part ways with some more orthodox class-focused leftists is on what we do with that recogntion and how it informs our organizing and advocacy.
For me, whiteness has been the transmission belt of false consciousness, in Marxist terms. And unless it is confronted directly (not danced around in the hopes of putting together some class solidarity by avoiding it), there can be no strong class consciousness among workers in America because white workers will settle for the property they have now, in whiteness, however inadequate, rather than join with Black and brown folks. Not because they are racist or evil or stupid, but because whiteness pays, however shitty, and sadly research in psychology has long shown us that people will more readily mobilize to defend against loss of what they already have, than to get something better.
This means that unless white folks, and specifically the working class, come to understand the trick of whiteness and the harm caused by it--and perhaps see it as yet another way the elite have fucked them over--there will be no progressive push within that group. White folks don't want universal programs of uplift Will...precisely because they are universal. That's the problem. They loved such programs from the 30s to the 60s, when only people like them/us were getting them (well, mostly at least). But once government came to be seen as something that also could be used to help POC, white folks abandoned even the New Deal type progressivism they had literally been endorsing for a generation. All the research since suggests this racialized resentment to "big government" is the key reason whites today won't get behind significant government intervention in health care, housing, food security, education, etc., let alone more thoroughgoing economic change (workplace democracy, etc). I go into this in greater detail in my book Under the Affluence.
That issue -- how racism and relative privilege have torpedoed class solidarity--has to be confronted. Ultimately, we in the so called identitiarian left largely diagnose the source of the rot similarly to how the socialist and class based left does. We differ on prognosis and recommended treatment, in places, but as to the origins of the problem, there is far far more overlap than divergence.
In any event, I appreciate your contribution to the discussion and just wanted to add my two cents (or, given the length, maybe my $1.50!) Take care.
