Images from the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — which resulted in injuries and deaths, including the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was protesting against the rally and was hit by a driver who rammed his car into a crowd — have been seared in our collective mind since the event occurred, in August.

Since then, the movement known as “antifa” has been blasted across mainstream news: Think pieces have been written about them, thousands of people have signed a petition asking for antifa to be listed as “terrorists,” and President Donald Trump has name-dropped the group on more than one occasion. But who are “antifa” and what do they actually stand for?

To find out more about this group, Teen Vogue spoke with Dartmouth College historian Mark Bray, who is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.

What is antifa?

I would say Antifa is a pan-radical-left politic, or activity of militant self-defense against the far right. It is a specific tendency, within a broader historical anti-fascist movement that goes back a century, that focuses on pan-left politics and a direct action strategic or tactical emphasis on fighting the far right. They don’t think that we should turn to the police or the state to stop neo-Nazi or far-right organizing; instead they advocate popular opposition and, if necessary, a militant response.

What is their primary motivation, and what activities do they typically engage in?

Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing; doing that can take many forms, and so the tactical repertoire of anti-fascists is broad.

The vast majority of what they do does not entail any physical confrontation. They focus on researching white supremacists and neo-Nazis across different social media platforms, figuring out who their leaders are, what other groups they are networking with, [and] where they are trying to hold events, so they can contact hotels or local venues to get the owners to cancel the events and, if they refuse to cancel, organize a boycott or campaigns of public pressure against them. They also organize public education campaigns and form alliances with unions and social movements to organize large demonstrations. Part of it, however, and this is what gets the most attention, entails self-defense and, at times, confronting these groups before they can gain enough momentum to promote their politics.

Critics contend that the antifa movement is violent and engages in illegal activity. Is this an accurate portrayal? If so, why do they choose to use those tactics?

What the media gets wrong is focusing on the spectacle without recognizing that that’s only the tip of the iceberg of anti-fascist organizing. As I said, the majority of it does not entail any confrontation, and is focused on exposing Nazis and using the popular opposition and unpopularity of Nazis more broadly to make it so that being a Nazi publicly is impossible. But of course part of what they do, if necessary, is to confront far-right groups physically.

They have a view of self-defense that entails both self-defense in an immediate sense and in a preemptive sense. The immediate sense has been very necessary and really the root origin of anti-fascism, both going back to the 1920s and '30s, when anti-fascism grew out of a need for self-defense from Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts, but also over past decades when immigrants' groups, leftists, punks, and skinheads have found a need in different times and places to defend themselves and fight back.