It seems to me that defining racism like this is less about reflecting some ground truth, and more about trying, through linguistic prescriptivism, to change an expansive term into something more proscribed, in order to focus attention only on a particular subset of activity. But doing so in a somewhat underhanded way, that avoids acknowledging or justifying the motivations behind the redefinition and instead attempts to make it a definitional fait acompli, saying "your definition is wrong, and mine is right".