Earlier this week, Roseanne Barr posted some genuinely vile stuff on Twitter that, among other things, referred to former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett as the hypothetical offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. ABC, gamely pretending as if it had no idea that Barr could be capable of doing such things, called her actions "abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values," and it cancelled its top-rated primetime show in which Barr portrays a proud Trump supporter. Equating black people to apes is one of the oldest and clearest examples of racism; insinuating nefarious connections between black people and Islamic terrorists is one of the newer ones. Barr deployed both of them in the space of 280 characters, and the network decided that it was not in their financial interests to be associated with her any longer.

In a case of spectacularly bad timing, the very next day, comedian Samantha Bee delivered a scathing critique of the Trump administration's barbaric policy of separating undocumented children from their parents—and the notable absence of alleged closet liberal Ivanka Trump from that debate—that ended with her calling the senior White House official a "feckless cunt." MAGA Twitter, still smarting from the results of the most recent skirmish in the ongoing culture wars in which this country is now embroiled, launched a performative outrage campaign that ended with the White House press secretary all but calling for Bee's show to be cancelled, too.

“The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a statement that called Barr's tweets "inappropriate" but conspicuously managed to avoid the r-word. “Her disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network.” Pivoting back to Barr, Sanders trotted out a grab bag of ABC-adjacent TV personalities who at some point have said mean or otherwise unpleasant things about President Trump and his ilk: Jemele Hill, who pointed out that Trump is a white supremacist; Joy Behar, who called Mike Pence's brand of Christianity a "mental illness"; and Kathy Griffin, who did that gross decapitated head thing that one time. Sanders' boss was a little less specific, but not less mad.

All of the people mentioned by Sanders and Trump—including Bee—have offered the demanded apologies. Some have watched their careers suffer as a result, too. CNN fired Griffin. ESPN suspended Hill for two weeks. Brian Ross, who badly flubbed a Russia probe story in December, was suspended for four. Given that Barr's show was cancelled altogether, these examples may not satisfy the right wing's howls for eye-for-an-eye justice. But indignantly pretending that "the left and its media allies" never face consequences for their actions is dishonest.

For a moment, though, set aside this omission from Sanders' narrative. The distinction that her brand of whataboutism misses is that none of these grounds for criticism are like racism. For centuries, white people in this country used racism to justify the subjugation and enslavement of black people, and even though the latter practice ended some 150 years ago, the former one persists today in more ways than I could enumerate in a single paragraph. Today, it is much harder to be both a member of polite society and also an unabashed racist. (Ask Aaron Schlossberg.) This slow attitudinal shift has not eradicated racism altogether, but at the very least, it has managed to shine a light on racist practices that in years past would probably have gone unaddressed.