It's a great deal more complicated than that.
First, class struggle isn't what "pretty much everyone does these days", not for those of us familiar with the history of historians. Absolutely the "great man of history" perspective of a century and a half ago has receded. Since then history has been diced and sliced from innumerable perspectives, from that of the long term social history (the Annales school) to that of econometricians, intellectual history, history through geography and environment, women's history, frontier history, slave history, southern history, multicultural "studies" history of different racial and ethnic sub-groups, immigrant history, etc. .
Second, the more recent forms of American history (since the 1960s/70s) include two types of particular interest to me: the Republicanism history which rediscovered and emphasized the primacy of ideas as a social and cultural movement, a motivating forces in history (rather than material self-interest).
Bernard Bailyn,
Gordon Wood from Harvard formed the "Cambridge School"; at Washington University the "St. Louis School" was led by
J.G.A. Pocock. And Atlantic History the social, immigration, and other history rooted in the Great Atlantic migration of millions of people not only too the new world but also throughout western Europe, and how the American experience was a part of that.
(A pretty good run-down as how it relates to American History can be found at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_United_States#Bancroft)
Finally, I think your distinction between Marxist analysis and communist thought isn't that illuminating. The prior left-wing emphasis on class struggle and labor in history was shifted in the 60s/70s to race and gender (sex) by the left. The pseudo Marxists and their left fellow travelers reacted to the the working class conservatism and their dislike of the social unrest (68 to 75) by abandoning working class politics and creating an identity bandwagon of racial and gender group self-interest.
Authentic Marxism believes that forms of production dictate social, that is, class relations. The objective interests of all people, regardless of race or gender, binds them together in class struggle of unified interests. The racialism (and genderism) of identity politics doesn't care about the ownership or means of production or class interests, they begin with the assumption that the race and gender struggle are not born in the conditions of production, but "in the DNA" of those "bad" people who are not of that particular race or gender. It has nothing to do with the transformation of production from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, and finally to socialism... it has everything to do with race as the immutable "DNA" division, a tribe vs. tribe struggle for hegemony...one that demands one side bend the knee and the other reap the spoils.
Is it any wonder then that the left has degenerated into idiot identity obsessed politics; "intersectional studies", "whiteness studies", "critical race theory" and just about every other attempt to pit one group against the other?
Anyway, there are a few esoteric 'critical race theory' authors who so attempt to link slavery to capitalism, and then portray capitalism as the root of all evil. But by in large, most on the cultural left are not that sophisticated (which is why many big businesses think it best to endorse this nonsense).
In sum: the current left is a kind of pseudo Marxist and pseudo Communist conglomeration which, at its root, is just raw tribalism with a moralistic veneer.
...what does Kendi have to do with the Critical Race Theory? He's expressing a view that is backed up with empirical evidence, not defining CRT.
