Kelley, I'm not pissed at you at all. In fact, the above is an _excellent_ example of sexism in the "debates" on the left and how some leftist men have different psychosocial investment in the categories of sex & gender than they do in that of race. I'm not dismissing differences; I'd only object to an attempt to turn differences into a hierarchy of oppression, which you say you do not and I take you at your word.
Many leftist white men (or women for that matter) do not have deeply personal & intimate relations with people of color, especially not with blacks. Whereas nearly all leftist men (including men of color) have made personal investment in the categories of sex, gender, & sexuality, made especially difficult to disinvest by their having had and continuing to have personal, intimate, sexual relations with persons _within_ the "proper" & "normal" boundaries created by the nexus of these categories, in a deeply sexist & heterosexist society. The personal gets political for them, without their being able to acknowledge this problem of personal investment. It is not by accident that gay men (whose needs, desires, and personal relationships are at cross-purposes with the ways in which the aforementioned categories have been deployed) have shown a far higher level of interest in feminism & gender studies than straight men have, historically speaking.
Moreover, sex, gender, and sexuality are still most often directly naturalized, and even leftists have trouble thinking of them as an always already political affair. On the other hand, the naturalization of race is only sometimes direct (e.g., _The Bell Curve_, studies in "genes for criminal behaviors," etc.). More often than not, the naturalization of race is mediated, thinly or heavily, by arguments about "culture," "environment," "family structure," "underclass," etc. Still and all, racist arguments, even if they are couched in culturalist/environmentalist terms, in the final analysis, depends upon the hidden naturalization of race.
Yoshie