I arrived in Charlottesville at sundown on Friday, where I'd come looking for an ending to the documentary I’m making on Confederate monuments. In two years of covering the debate in New Orleans, I had grown used to hearing monument supporters claim that these statues “have nothing to do with white supremacy.” And here I was driving toward the largest white supremacist rally in decades at Charlottesville’s monument to Robert E. Lee.

The things I saw in Charlottesville were haunting: hundreds of young white men raising torches and Nazi salutes into the air, howling and chanting, “blood and soil.” I saw them beat a man bloody at the base of the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson statue, a wave of matching white polos and splintering tiki torches crashing down on their enemy. I watched them cheer through it all.

But nothing troubled me more than when I watched a Nazi disappear.

It was Saturday, and the police had finally called for everyone to clear the park. As I filmed officers opening up a blocked street, a young man ran into view, screaming for help. He wore the khaki-and-white uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. He had been separated from them and was being chased by at least one protester. He ripped off his shirt and begged the crowd for mercy. He wasn't actually into white power, you see.

Video by C. J. Hunt

“Barely,” he clarified to me. As he shoved his polo shirt into a plastic bag, the fear on his face settled into a smirk. “It’s kind of a fun idea,” he explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

I didn’t know. But by the look of things, the fun of shouting “white power” stopped as soon as he was threatened with the same violence his group brought to bear on others. Cut off from the pack, forced to face the consequences of his inflammatory behavior, he found escape in a costume change.

Since I'm a person of color, my identity is not a uniform I can take off when I am feeling unsafe—when I'm stopped by police or when my white girlfriend and I travel through southern towns where Confederate flags billow from porches and pickup trucks. Like all minorities, I’ve grown used to the way that difference marks me—the burden of being ever ready for the moment my skin turns me into a target for angry white men determined to take back what they think the world owes them.

Bret Stephens Is Here to "Well, Actually..." Charlottesville Maybe the New York Times shouldn't have hired him.

The video of this part-time Nazi, this junior secessionist, is a perfect portrait of the very white privilege the so-called “alt-right” decries as liberal fiction. White privilege isn’t just an easy bank loan or the cumulative effects of discriminatory housing policy. It's also the privilege to disappear. The privilege to terrorize a community and return to your regular life with the ease of peeling off a polo shirt. The privilege to come to someone else’s town, invoke the symbols and slogans used to terrorize Jews, African-Americans, and countless other races in history’s darkest chapters, and pretend it’s simply your way of showing ethnic pride. It’s the privilege to engage in terror “for fun,” and the privilege to walk away. For most of my life, I've thought of racism as the vestiges of a dying generation. It's far more terrifying to behold a sea of young people for whom white supremacy is just a rec-league sport.

I followed the young man, watching him slip shirtless and undetected through a crowd like a child playing capture the flag, taking his free walk back to his side. White terror, his sword. White innocence, his shield. I looked on in horror and envy as he disappeared into the scrum, neither of us knowing that somewhere on a crowded street less than a mile away, others would not be so lucky.

C. J. Hunt is a writer and producer who regularly hosts The Moth and is currently directing a documentary about America's curious love affair with Confederate monuments.

Watch Now:

Trump and Charlottesville: Too Little, Too Late