One of the big kerfuffles in women’s sports right now is only tangentially about sports. It’s mostly about race.

It involves, also tangentially, Caitlin Clark, the sharpshooting basketball phenom for the University of Iowa who is tearing through college records like they were so many tissue-paper intramural defenses. Last week she bested Pete Maravich’s all-time scoring record of 3,667 points in a game against Ohio State. She’s currently at 3,771 points as the Hawkeyes get ready for what will almost certainly be a No. 1 seed in next week’s NCAA tournament. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Trump Is Leading Among Working-Class Americans)

But it was one early mark on her march through the history books, when she broke Kelsey Plum’s all-time women’s NCAA scoring record of 3,527 points, that got the attention of one all-time great of seasons past. Sheryl Swoopes, a Hall of Famer and iconic star of the WNBA, appeared on Gilbert Arenas’s podcast. “Records are made and set to [be] broken,” Swoopes said, according to the New York Post. “If you’re going to break a record, to me, if it’s legitimate you have to break that record in the same amount of time that that player set it in. So if Kelsey Plum set that record in four years, well Caitlin should have broke that record in four years.… She’s already had an extra year to break that record. So, is it truly a broken record?”

To contend that only the other group can be racist is to espouse one’s own superiority.

So, Swoopes said Clark needed five seasons to better a record Plum set in four. And she wasn’t done: she also said Clark was 25 years old, playing against younger players, and took 40 shots a game.

The truth is: Clark is finishing her fourth season, is 22 years old, and, for her career, is averaging 22.7 shots per game.

The Iowa social media team fired back with a tweet setting Swoopes straight, and Iowa fans started wearing “Don’t be a Sheryl” T-shirts.

The boys at Outkick noted that Swoopes donned a T-shirt proclaiming herself as “Female, Fearless, and Black” on Arenas’s podcast, and that Arenas, on an earlier podcast, had lambasted white European players as the problem for the NBA and wanted the league to ban them. Outkick commentators Dan Dakich, Jason Whitlock, and Bobby Burack wondered whether racial animus was behind Swoopes’s comments, as did others on social media.

Swoopes went back on Arenas’s podcast and said this: “For people to come at me and say that I made those comments [about Clark] because I’m a racist.… First of all, black people can’t be racist; but that’s the farthest thing from my mind.”

Swoopes then catalogued a personal history of growing up in a predominantly white town, playing basketball with white teammates, and having white friends, but it was the allegation that blacks can’t be racist that drew the media buzz, both social and traditional.

So, we’re back to that old canard, the get-out-of-bigotry-trouble-free card played by minorities who make negative comments about other races: they by definition cannot be racists.

And, not surprisingly, the argument over all the years this charge has been coursing through our culture has not changed. There is one and only one reason blacks can’t be racist: they don’t have the power to enact their racism.

All they can be is prejudiced. Writes Clyde W. Ford in the Los Angeles Times:

Black or white, anyone can be prejudiced. I might not like you because of your skin color, and that makes me prejudiced. But it doesn’t automatically make me racist unless I also have the power to impact your life because of my prejudice. There are few, if any, areas of American life where Blacks hold such power. Thus, Sheryl Swoopes was correct. Blacks can’t be racist — but that doesn’t mean they can’t be prejudiced. They can.

See how this works? If a white disparages or discriminates against a black because of his skin color, he’s a racist. He can be condemned, ostracized, possibly fired from his job, because being racist is the modern scarlet letter and merely being called such is an accusation that cannot be effectively rebutted.

If the black disparages or discriminates against a white because of his skin color, he’s merely prejudiced. And that’s okay, because anybody can be prejudiced. (READ MORE: College Jocks Given Green Light to Unionize)

To define racism in a manner that automatically absolves one from being a racist will certainly give one the upper hand in an argument. The functional definition of racism, as an exercise in group power, according to Peter H. Wood, goes back, at least, to the Black Panthers, “who fought racism with more racism, which they felt was justified anger, not racism.” It was perpetuated in the 1980s, via an article in the Socialist Worker entitled “The Fallacy of ‘Reverse Racism,’” which contended that blacks could not be racist. “They are not in a position to oppress anyone — certainly not the majority white population of the U.S.” Since then the idea has become entrenched in media and academia, and authors espousing it — the Ibram X. Kendis, the Robin DiAngelos of the world — have become unassailable media darlings.

The only thing this definition accomplishes, however, is avoiding the label of racist. To contend that only the other group can be racist is to espouse one’s own superiority — they’re inferior, that is, racist, while we’re superior, that is, not racist. It’s flipping the field, so to speak, which, while gratifying for the flippers, is still racism. It’s elevating one group at the expense of another based on race, which is the very thing that has nettled our nation’s history in the past and that the nation, in laws and attitudes, has attempted seriously to amend.

Using the traditional definition of racism is the only way forward. Under that definition, which has long-standing validity and incorporates the whole human race — that is, “Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” — being prejudiced against someone because of his or her skin color is racism.

Racism must be judged as an individual action. It should not be judged as one thing when one person does it and a different thing when another person does it. People cannot be judged differently for having the same opinion or saying the same thing. In what world will those who are judged more harshly be satisfied with that result? (READ MORE: Get Ready for the College Football Explosion)

That sort of inequity will never fly with the majority of people in this country. And the racial divide will never narrow.