If you opened Twitter or Facebook this weekend and stumbled upon the Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark “discussion,” then you’re probably feeling the way I am right now. Feeling the need to jump head first off the Comcast building.

The CliffsNotes here is that LSU beat Iowa in the women’s national title game, and at the end of the contest, LSU’s Reese sought out Iowa’s Clark, gave her the John Cena “you can’t see me” move, then pointed to her ring finger:

Clark was one of the stars of the tournament, a scoring machine who knocked down shot after shot. Reese wasn’t pouring in 40 points ala Clark, but bagged seven-straight double-doubles for the Tigers en route to the title. All you need to know is that these were two of the best players in the competition.

The knee jerk reaction from a portion of Twitter was that Reese was “classless” for taunting Clark, while the other half of Twitter pointed out that Clark had done the same exact thing earlier in the tournament. I saw dozens and dozens of tweets like this one:

People like Acho aren’t wrong, though the respective taunts were a little different. In the case of Reese, she walked towards Clark at the final buzzer and gestured right in her grill, more or less seeking her out, which was pretty savage if we’re being honest. If Jalen Hurts did this right in Dak Prescott’s stupid face, we’d build a statue for him:


That in and of itself is part of the problem here, because when Deion Sanders starts high stepping at the 50 yard line, we talk about how badass that is, but when two women are involved, the morality police flock to social media and decide what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate. These are two competitors competing, just let them be themselves. Stuff like this happens on almost every single play in the NFL, and nobody has a problem with it. There’s a different standard for young women because they’re supposed be what, more classy? Let them talk their shit. Caitlin Clark will be playing in the WNBA. She can handle this. If she’s gonna dish it out, she can take it. That part of the story is more or less a nothing burger.

The other part of the story is what made this especially gross, and I’m probably burying the lede here, but I’m talking about the ridiculous racial undertone. This was a huge national sporting event with a black girl taunting a white girl, so every dickhead with a social media account felt the need to log on and say something. It was so incredibly obvious that a portion of white people calling this “classless” believed so only because the black girl was doing the taunting, without knowing that Clark did it earlier in the tournament. Then, on the other side, you have people like Exavier Pope going overboard with whatever the fuck this tweet is:

lol

Ghettoizing? Colonizer mindset? What are we even doing here? This is not that complicated. You had two great players going at it in a title game. The winning player hit the losing player with a taunt, right in her losing face. It’s not that big of a deal.

The final point I’d like to make is that the women’s tournament was really good this year. The ratings were excellent. You had star power and intriguing storylines. Idiots on Twitter and Facebook somehow turned it into a referendum on race relations in the United States of America, but I’m not surprised, because nuance is dead. Everything is unnecessarily combative. We all suck!

I think Zanz has it right: