The photographs from Charlottesville, Va., last weekend tell multiple stories. They document a rally, “Unite the Right,” where a protest over the removal of a Confederate monument served as a smokescreen for spewing racist and anti-Semitic hate. They show the counterprotesters who gathered to uphold the values of democracy and justice. They depict the murder and injury of some of these courageous individuals.

Some of the most fascinating and telling photographs focus on groups of enraged men carrying Tiki torches and shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans as they marched through the streets of Charlottesville. Perhaps the most significant implication of these images is the extent to which neo-Nazism and white supremacy have entered a new era — a movement mainstreamed by its followers and enabled by a sitting president.

These photographs and startling video footage portrayed neo-Nazis and white supremacists not as abstract figures lurking in shadows or concealed by hoods but as proud men and women openly displaying their bigotry. Their visibility also made them identifiable, so much so that a Twitter account, “Yes, You’re Racist,” circulated photos of them in an effort to publicly expose and shame them.

The photographic documentation of hate has typically stressed the consequences of bigotry, violence and genocide to demonstrate its gravity: the shattered, glass-strewn German streets, Jewish businesses and synagogues that were photographed as the sun rose on the devastation of Kristallnacht in November 1938; stark pictures of young people clinging to a building as Bull Connor’s troops targeted them with forceful water jets during the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963; a dying Philando Castile, his bloodied and lifeless body live-streamed last summer by his girlfriend, after he was shot by the police during a traffic stop near St. Paul.

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But some of the most consequential photographs of racial discord, like the images out of Charlottesville, focus not on the victim but on the perpetrator. They reveal what pictures of oppression, violence and destruction generally do not: the ordinary people who typically perpetuate white supremacy. These people are sons and daughters, siblings, spouses and parents who today have traded Klan hoods for polo shirts and khakis. Many are college educated and employed in white collar jobs. They look like people we know — friends, co-workers, neighbors and family. And they have one thing in common: an allegiance to a scurrilous ideology bent on intimidating, disempowering, and even annihilating African-Americans, Jews and others they view as foreign or racially impure.

A former F.B.I. agent, Michael German, who went undercover with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, observed on CNN that the most perilous threat comes from activists who blend into mainstream society. “It wasn’t necessarily the skinhead with the tattoos and the club who was dangerous,” Mr. German said, “but somebody who wore a suit and went to work in an office and was college educated and much more capable as a threat than some drunk skinhead.”

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The mainstreaming of hate is not new. Cameras have revealed the ordinariness of racist and anti-Semitic agitators: the fresh-faced zealots of the Hitler Youth; the family-minded Nazi sympathizers of the German-American Bund; the well-dressed lynch mobs, posing before black and Mexican bodies dangling from trees; or the unrequited rage of a white teenager, her face contorted in fury, as she screams at an African-American student integrating a high school in Little Rock, Ark.

But now President Trump’s seeming inability to forcefully condemn as terrorism the actions of domestic hate groups enables them in ways that are unprecedented. To ignore, dismiss, or manipulate the implications of these photographs is to further the injustices they represent. As Donald J. Trump draws moral equivalence between the forces of racist and anti-Semitic hate and the men and women who stood up to them, he reveals a distorted sense of right and wrong.

We cannot ignore the logic of President Trump’s words, which would equate the rebellious inmates of the Warsaw Ghetto with the Nazi collaborators who imprisoned and murdered them or condemn the brave young people of the Children’s Crusade as they rose up against the noxious belief system of Jim Crow segregation. Can we credibly argue that these courageous people were morally equivalent to their oppressors?

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The photographs of white supremacist rage and resentment in Charlottesville do more than affirm that unrepentant bigots live next door to us, date our sons and daughters, and work in our institutions. They also remind us that blindly supporting a president committed to stoking the flames of white supremacy and bigotry is itself an act of complicity.

A vast majority of Americans are good people who are clearly repulsed by what that they have witnessed in the photographs of Charlottesville. But the very ordinariness of the people these images bluntly represent underscores that bigotry is not solely perpetrated at the extremes and as something exceptional. It is everywhere, having infiltrated every corner of society and culture, in places and institutions on the right, left, and in the middle.

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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