“Roseanne” was not canceled because it is mean or “HORRIBLE” to compare a black person to an ape (though it is both of those things). It was canceled because it carries the weight of both historic horrors and current atrocities — because comparing a black person to an ape nods to a historically rooted yet increasingly emboldened far-right hate movement whose chosen figurehead, Donald Trump, is the president of the United States. Because it is our collective responsibility to not let that movement win, to fight to be a better country, and right now cultural power is all we have.

Perhaps more significantly, “Roseanne” was canceled because it is bad for business (for now) when your prime-time family sitcom’s star sounds like David Duke — just as it will eventually become bad for the N.F.L.’s business to punish black players for protesting police brutality.

Disclosure: I had my own bizarre and unpleasant run-in with Barr in the summer of 2013. I’d appeared on a TV show to talk about political correctness (specifically rape jokes) in comedy, and Barr became convinced that I was the P.C. police. She tweeted a video I’d made about the online harassment that I was receiving (sample: “This big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her”) and described me as a “female advocating censorship of comedy.”

I tried to explain, it didn’t work, and things devolved from there in the way they typically do on Twitter. Eventually, in disbelief, I had to block Roseanne Barr. I loved Roseanne Barr. This was not how I’d imagined our first encounter. And she never forgot. Every once in a while, even five years later, she occasionally tweets, “Lindy West is a fat bitch.”

The term “political correctness” (much like the slimy “pro-life”) is a right-wing neologism, a tactical bending of reality, an attempt to colonize the playing field, a bluff to lure dupes into dignifying propaganda. True to form, the credulous left adopted it wholesale in the early ’90s, electively embroiling us in three decades of bad-faith “debate” over whether discouraging white people from using racial slurs constitutes government censorship. Of course it doesn’t. Debate over. Treating anti-P.C. arguments as anything but a shell game props up the lie that it is somehow unfair to identify and point out racism, let alone fight to eradicate it. Pointing out and fighting to eradicate racism is how we build the racism-free world that all but racists profess to want.

The anti-P.C. set deliberately frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings — like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications — as though if we simply reject political correctness we can still have “Roseanne.” But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness — it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.