A common refrain I’ve since seen across the mediascape — and even at my own church this Sunday by Governor Terry McAuliffe — is the phrase (or an iteration of it): “This is not us.” People want to indicate that the hatred and violence on display in Charlottesville represents some of the worst intolerance that humanity has to offer, that it is not in keeping with the good will that most Americans feel toward one another. Another well-meaning and common response is that the “alt-right” demonstrators should be called “what they are” — meaning, in this case, Nazis. It’s a rhetorical move that rejects the supposedly more polite label of "alt-right."

As both a historian and a person who grew up in small-town Virginia under the shadow of the Confederate battle flag, I look at images from Charlottesville and think that “just call them Nazis” misses a significant point. Although my focus on terminology could be, and has been referred to as, an instance of “When your academic head gets . . . stuck up in your academic ass,” I must insist upon some nuance. Being specific about the varieties of white nationalism and white supremacist ideology on display in Charlottesville can only help those of us who oppose such views and the violence they create.

Germany’s Third Reich caused the massacre of millions of Jewish, Roma, disabled, African-descended, homosexual, and other individuals who fell outside Adolf Hitler’s Aryan racial ideal. For most Americans who learned about World War II in school, the term “Nazi” conjures ghastly images of anti-Semitic violence that continue to shock and disturb, even 72 years after the regime came to an end. Among Americans, “Nazis” of this time are an agreed-upon evil — a group whose bigotry we helped to defeat. In reality, however, Hitler found inspiration for his own eugenic ideology and race-based lawmaking in the United States. Defeating Nazi Germany, therefore, did not mean eliminating the racial ideologies that gave rise to Nazism in the first place.

Statements like “this is not us” are patently untrue in the case of an event organized by an individual — Richard Spencer — who was educated at the University of Virginia, an institution founded by slave-owning Thomas Jefferson, who is inseparable from American white supremacist ideology. To “just call them Nazis” is to erase the national, regional, and local particularities in America that color white nationalist thought.

This is our national heritage. This is us.

As a group of UVA-based scholars recently explained in Slate, intertwined anti-black racial terror and Confederate nostalgia were present when a statue of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee was unveiled in Charlottesville on May 21, 1924 — nearly 60 years after the end of the Civil War — “during a two-day gathering of the Sons of the Confederacy at which the city also saw KKK agitation.” In 2017, while the city responds to antiracists’s call to disentangle itself from its historic embrace of Confederate ancestor worship, the backlash has been a distinctly American form of racial hatred and violent intimidation — not Nazism.

The “Unite the Right” rally was only the latest in a series of white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville alone this year. In response to the city council’s decisions to remove a statue of Lee from the park bearing his name and change the name of that park and one named after Confederate Army General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, various white nationalist groups have come for the explicit purpose of protesting what they view as the city’s erasure of Southern white heritage. With Charlottesville blogger Jason Kessler, Republican gubernatorial primary candidate Corey Stewart organized the “Rally to Preserve Our Heritage” in downtown Charlottesville in February; it was attended by the Virginia Flaggers and other self-styled defenders of Southern heritage. In May, Richard Spencer led another demonstration in Lee Park, where protesters wielded torches and chanted “you will not replace us” — the “us” being white people, whom Spencer and his followers argued were being pushed out of public space and historical memory by the actions of the city council. July saw the arrival of a fresh group of advocates for the preservation of Confederate symbols: approximately 40 members of the North Carolina–based Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who were met by more than 1,000 counterprotesters in downtown Charlottesville.