Charles, we've been there many times and I do not think that rehashing these arguments is going to change anything. I would be the last person to reduce causality to a single abstract dimension, albeit I also believe that much, if not most, talk about race and racism is a diversion - either deliberate or inadvertent - from the fundamentally faulty design of the US society. I think that attempts to answer what was first, class or race, or perhaps to attribute shares of variance to "race" culture or "economic class' is simply hair splitting and a blame game which first cannot be answered in a scientific way, and second does not lead anywhere politically.
In my personal experience, ethnicity does not matter that much (if at all) as class. I have a better communication with, say, a black professional than with a white redneck, or with an Indian sociologist than a Polish peasant. There is something about the lumpenproletariat, no matter what skin color or ethnicity, that repulses me - perhaps it is the penchant for physical violence, or anthropomorphization of everything that happens, or aesthetic tackiness, or religiosity, or smartalec-ism, or rowdiness and noise - or perhaps all those altogether and something else. I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, nor do I think that it is only the lumpenproleteriat that have these qualities - in fact business class shows the very same traits. But this is what sets me apart from these people. So anything I say will obviously be filtered through that experience although I do recognize that not everything can be reduced to the class dimension. I am saying this to be frank about myself rather than to argue or settle anything. So let's just leave it like that.
Wojtek