> Acknowledgment of race is inherently an essentialist position

No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct, which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race. The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

> No, you can acknowledge race as a widespread social construct, which having been constructed, has material effects that can only be fully discussed by including race.

That is still essentialism with extra steps. Social or not, your category hinges on purportedly durable and universal attributes, whether they arrived from within or without.

> The idea that we can only discuss categories with an essential characteristic is, itself, an incorrectly essentialist idea.

That's a strawman argument I haven't made. I am against conflating pragmatic categories with essentialist categories. There is a difference between using x as an ephemeral demographic category to address the material issues you allude to vs overplaying it to an x'ness as an essentialist identitarian concept.

You can acknowledge that there is a social construct called "race" that some people believe is useful for predicting things about individuals without subscribing to those beliefs yourself.

E.g., some people argue that white people are unfit for certain roles because they haven't endured the sufferings of people of color which is clearly expressing a belief that (1) race is real and (2) race is useful for predicting things about individual white and non-white people. This is racism, race essentialism, etc. But I can also acknowledge that those people are more likely to treat white people (i.e., the people that they put into their "white" category) differently than nonwhite (i.e., the people they put into their "people of color" category). This is not racism or race essentialism or etc.

What the U.S. calls "races" would simply be considered subcultures in the rest of the world. (Bordering on ethnicities, but not really - they're way too integrated within mainstream culture to be true ethnic subdivisions.) You can acknowledge subcultures without clinging to the absurd notion (that is, absurd to much of the civilized world) that "race" is a legitimate term at all, even for a socially and culturally-bound construct.

I don’t think that’s correct considering people from Nigeria, France, or N-th generation Americans can all be considered “black” provided they have a certain set of physical traits even though these people very likely have very different cultures. So the American notion of “race” spans cultures and it is derived from physical traits, not cultural artifacts.

Whether African immigrants qualify as "truly" Black is actually a very contentious point within Black culture itself, and that's despite widespread solidarity with Africa and Pan-African ideals. This makes 100% sense if you regard this U.S. notion of "race" as a pure social construct, something not dependent on any fixed set of physical traits or purported ancestry.

Within American culture, it’s not contentious that dark-skinned African people are “black”, certainly no less so when they immigrate to the US. But that’s race.

There is also a distinct notion of “black culture” which is a subset of American culture (people who identify with black culture also tend to be racially black, but not every racially black American identifies with black culture). That there is a “black culture” doesn’t mean that the American notion of race is incorrect.