> 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.