DiJonai Carrington may have committed the most educational flagrant foul in the history of basketball.

I was discussing the episode with a friend who asked, “Do you remember roller derby?” I confessed I did not. “It was a sport where people enjoyed watching women beat each other up,” he said. I saw the connection immediately.

‘White privilege’ did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree.

It reminded me of undergraduate classes in which feminists argued that women should run the world because they are more level-headed, calm, and compassionate than men. I had also watched some of those same people treat conservative colleagues with remarkable contempt. The theory and the behavior did not always match.

The WNBA has lately offered a rather vivid reminder that women, being human, are perfectly capable of aggression, rivalry, resentment, and the occasional refusal to accept responsibility.

During Saturday’s game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever, Sophie Cunningham broke toward the basket for a layup. Carrington pursued her from behind and struck Cunningham across the head and neck. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded it to a flagrant 2, and ejected Carrington.

This was WNBA drama. Then higher education entered the game.

After her ejection, Carrington posted on Threads: “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.”

One has to admire the efficiency. Universities can spend an entire semester teaching students to interpret ordinary human interactions through racial categories. Carrington managed it before the game was over.

Predictably, people asked the obvious question: What precisely did Cunningham’s whiteness have to do with Carrington hitting her in the face?

Former NFL player Emmanuel Acho was among those who challenged Carrington’s invocation of white privilege. Carrington later said people had misunderstood her: She was not claiming the ejection itself was caused by white privilege, but pointing to what she regarded as a larger pattern of white players receiving different treatment. She defended her understanding of the subject by citing her education, including Stanford.

And there, buried beneath the WNBA drama, was the genuinely interesting story.

Carrington herself appealed to her education as authority for the framework she was using. That does not prove some Stanford professor taught her how to explain this particular foul. It does show how natural it has become for educated Americans to reach for concepts such as “white privilege” when interpreting conflict and punishment.

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America’s universities have spent decades teaching students to interpret institutions and human behavior through racial categories. “White privilege” did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree. Students encounter frameworks in which racial identity becomes a morally significant category through which achievements, punishments, disagreements, and disparities are interpreted.

Carrington apparently regards her education as establishing her authority on the subject. Fine. Then taxpayers and parents should pay attention to what that education teaches people to see.

Stanford is private, of course, but like many American universities, it receives substantial federal funding. Universities receiving federal money are subject to federal antidiscrimination law. That does not mean professors cannot discuss controversial theories of race. They obviously can. The serious question comes when theories move from subjects to be examined into institutional doctrines that classify people morally by race.

Imagine reversing the language. Imagine a university program teaching students to interpret the behavior of black classmates through a theory of “black privilege,” complete with generalizations about what black people characteristically possess, how they characteristically think, and what judgments should attach to them because of their racial identity.

Would anyone seriously maintain that race had nothing to do with it?

The Carrington episode also illustrates something universities rarely advertise about these theories: They can be wonderfully useful for avoiding personal responsibility.

In the classical university, education aimed at forming a good soul: one capable of wisdom, ordered toward what is good, and disciplined against vices such as hatred, envy, and bitterness. This did not mean the good person escaped persecution or injustice. It meant that injustice did not excuse becoming unjust in return. A good soul fears God, not men — or women.

Today’s university is different. It teaches students to locate wrongdoing in systems, structures, identities, and power. Once in a while those explanations are relevant. But they can also become a vocabulary for explaining away one’s own choices. For the philosophy students reading this, the contrast is Socrates versus Thrasymachus: seek the good, or reduce everything to power.

The old-fashioned response to committing a flagrant foul was fairly straightforward: “I went too far.”

The new response requires considerably more vocabulary.

One can discuss systems, privilege, disparities, power structures, historical patterns, and institutional inequities until the original question — “Why did you hit her in the face?” — disappears beneath a small graduate seminar.

That is one of the most corrosive temptations of identity ideology. It can supply an external explanation for almost every unfavorable consequence. If I succeed, I overcame oppression. If you succeed, you benefited from privilege. If I am punished, we investigate the system. If you are punished, justice has finally arrived.

Personal responsibility becomes strangely difficult to locate.

Carrington has also defended her aggressive play on the grounds that she will do everything she can to prevent an opponent from making a layup. Fair enough — except that this rather misses the point of organized sports.

Basketball is not defined as “do everything you can to stop the other person.” It has rules.

That’s what distinguishes basketball from rugby or a parking-lot fight.

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You may contest the shot. You may block the ball. You may position yourself defensively. You may even commit an ordinary foul to force free throws. What you may not do is simply employ whatever technique seems most likely to prevent the basket.

Otherwise, why stop with a cross-face? Tackle her. Bite her. Kick her. Put her in a rear-naked choke.

Although, given recent WNBA highlights, perhaps I should stop giving anyone ideas.

The rules are not an obstacle to the game. The rules constitute the game. And that is precisely the moral lesson obscured by the ideology Carrington invoked.

Civil society works the same way. We do not get to suspend ordinary standards of conduct because we believe ourselves to be fighting injustice. We do not get to judge people by their skin color because an elaborate theory tells us doing so is enlightened. Anti-racism becomes corrupting when it licenses hatred, envy, or racial blame in the name of correcting hatred, envy, and racial injustice.

Carrington’s foul lasted only a moment.

Her explanation deserves more attention because it inadvertently reminded Americans that when racial ideology shows up on the basketball court, it did not necessarily begin there.

Someone taught the framework. Quite possibly at a university. And taxpayers help support the institutions where it flourishes.