White supremacists wearing shirts emblazoned with Hitler quotes, waving Nazi flags and shouting Nazi slogans. Heavily armed militias parading the streets. Enraged faces illuminated by flaming torches. The footage from last weekend’s Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Va., presents a terrifyingly vicious and violent picture of white supremacy in the United States.

But the footage is also revealing for what it does not depict: an aggressive police crackdown against the demonstrators.

Unlike Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock — who stood with their arms raised in prayer, against the environmental threat posed by the Dakota Access Pipeline — the Unite the Right rampagers were not blasted with freezing water canons, or shot in the head with rubber bullets.

Unlike Black Lives Matter protestors in cities across the U.S. — who marched with their arms raised in peace, chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” — the collection of haters who congregated in Virginia were not met with snipers and armoured vehicles, or assaulted with batons and military weapons.

Instead, journalists on the ground in Charlottesville reported that police largely stood back while white supremacist mobs, who had come prepared to inflict bloodshed, confronted counterprotesters.

“The police didn’t do anything in terms of protecting the people of the community, the clergy,” said Cornel West, Harvard professor and political activist. “If it hadn’t been for the anti-fascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.” A 20-year-old Black counter-protestor, De’Andre Harris, was pummelled with metal poles outside a police station.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe defended the police’s anemic response by explaining that the militias “had better equipment than our state police … You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army.”

There were two faces of racism on display in Charlottesville last week: the ostentatious hatred of Unite the Right, and the institutionalized bias of law enforcement.

When mostly non-violent Indigenous and Black activists are policed like they are more dangerous than openly violent white neo-Nazis; when White militias are allowed to roam the streets armed like an invading military force, but young Black boys are shot by police for playing with toy guns — these are manifestations of the privileging of white lives.

The growth of white supremacist groups, and the muted police reaction that gives them oxygen, are not phenomena confined to the U.S. They are present north of the border, too.

Academics Barbara Perry and Ryan Scrivens have documented more than 100 racist right-wing extremist groups active in Canada, some with as many as 100 members. In Toronto, journalists and activists have described being attacked at protests by white supremacist assailants, with limited intervention by police.

Storm Alliance, a Canadian offshoot of European anti-immigrant hate group Soldiers of Odin, has been patrolling the Canada-U.S. border to monitor refugee crossings. An anti-Muslim “patriot” organization called the III% has been engaging in live fire paramilitary training exercises, and conducting stakeouts of mosques. The RCMP responded to a recent Vice report on the III% by stating that it “does not investigate movements or ideologies,” only “criminal activity.”

Indigenous peoples, in contrast, are being treated like criminals for non-violently protecting their own lands, waters, and rights. The RCMP has sent at least 150 officers to Muskrat Falls in Labrador, for example, where Inuit and Innu protesters have been opposing a dam project with tactics like hunger strikes and blockades. The Mounties have been questioning and carding residents of Muskrat Falls; dozens have been arrested for non-violent offences, and several — including elders like Beatrice Hunter — have been imprisoned.

“Criminalization is one of those tactics that, just with brute force … you clear the path for development,” observes criminology professor Shiri Pasternak.

Policing in North America is deeply rooted in racist histories. The precursor of the RCMP in Canada was the North-West Mounted Police: a paramilitary force deployed to oust Indigenous nations from their territories and subjugate them to colonial control. And some of the first police bodies in Southern states, such as Virginia, were slave patrols: gangs of white men assembled to hunt down and terrorize enslaved Black people who managed to escape.

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As recent events demonstrate, the efforts of Indigenous, Black, and other racially oppressed communities to be free from injustice are still treated by police as threats — as greater threats, perversely, than the white supremacists committed to maintaining racial injustice with brute violence.