On Saturday morning, before James Alex Fields allegedly slammed the gas pedal of his Dodge Challenger and plowed through a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, the prevalent image of the #UniteTheRight march at the University of Virginia showed a photo of a merry band of white supremacists obliviously wielding Polynesian-inspired Tiki torches, spewing bigoted singsong nonsense into the warm Virginia night. It’s a remarkable image for a number of reasons: the innocuous polo shirts; the trendy haircuts; the wireframe glasses. It didn't take long for it to become a meme on Twitter.

But what struck me most was how familiar, how comfortable, these otherwise forgettable young men appeared in front of the camera. They could be from anywhere, and wouldn’t look out of place foisting martini shakers in Portland, or Nashville, or Brooklyn—they blend together so seamlessly that you'd be forgiven for checking WebMD for symptoms of white people face aphasia. Even if they are indiscernible, their expressions, taken together, suggested an emboldening. As Eve Ewing observed on Twitter, “They didn't even feel the need to wear hoods. They're all confident they'll have jobs on Monday.”

It's a grim reminder of the enmeshed power of white supremacy, here, in 2017. Richard Spencer (who, like former KKK grand wizard-turned-politician David Duke, is continually rewarded with glossy magazine profiles, as if their hate deserves fascination or explanation) would rather not use that phrase due to its historical connotations, which is all the more reason to use it. And while there’s some power in diminishing and de-legitimizing white supremacists for what they are—angry, impotent white men who cling to their whiteness like a security blanket—they’re not an aberration. They're just what happens to be visible.

Racism persists not because of white men taking up torches and makeshift wood shields from Home Depot, but because we live in a nation that still glosses over the rickety foundation of slavery on which it’s built. It's cathartic and maybe convenient to shout down a Nazi, but white people who hold repugnant views on race are far from “fringe,” as GQ columnist Damon Young writes at VSB: