Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.

“Ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power,” James Baldwin argued in 1972 in “No Name in the Street,” “is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

In America, to this day, assaults on justice and equal rights continue with too many Americans complicit, through their silence, with those who yearn to transform our nation into a race-based, white nationalist authoritarian state based on prejudices that, to our shame, persist to this very moment.

In 1924, a KKK gathering in Rochester, New Hampshire attracted 10,000. In Maine, the same year, Klan membership topped 40,000. In Indiana, the same decade, 250,000 people were Klan members, and by 1925 over half the General Assembly, the governor, and many other high-ranking state and local officials were Klan members.

One Halloween in the late 1980s my trick-or-treating daughter and a friend were greeted at a neighborhood door by a man, an employee of the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office and Newfields Police Department, dressed as a Klan member.

I have a theory about all this: As personal and public displays of Klan and “America First” sympathies diminished nationally over decades the survivors of those haters, antisemites, and anti-Catholic racists continued to share meals and holidays. There, I believe, grievances and resentments were transmitted from generation to generation, mostly by white, self-described, “God-fearing” Christians.

And as public expressions of racialist sentiments appeared to diminish, America has been lulled into thinking that racism itself has somehow been overcome.

They are wrong. Racist sentiments, today institutionally embedded and protected, persist to this moment.

America, today fighting an existential battle of survival on soil nourished by the blood of patriots, has been formed by stories, often scarred, not always healed. Stories of original sin, stories suppressed, stories that persist to this day.

On this soil I witness three sides in conflict.

First, there is my side, advocating for an inclusive America of pluralism and diversity where all people are created equal.

Second, there’s the “right” side, evangelically-inspired, intolerant of the Other, authoritarian, that yearns for an America that never existed.

Today, having lost a Civil War, having failed in an insurrection, the second side has launched a new offensive, a cultural jihad, that today challenges our very existence as a representative democracy.

Then there is the third side. Authored and sustained by white people of privilege — and some people of color seduced by their proximity to power — it is a delusional and dangerous cohort which believes that moderates, as they define themselves, are the ones who most resemble America. Often described as advocates for finding common ground, the third side often believes that conflict can be resolved if we just talk to each other.

They are wrong. I have nothing to say to people who have painted a target on my back.

Deluded by privilege and convinced they can bring competing sides to the table, they are often unable to discern the full nature of the risks America confronts and thus, unable to discern the malign intent of racists, they become complicit on issues of privilege, race, and institutional racism — issues that persist to this day.

It is not a conflict between woke and un-woke. It is a conflict between justice and institutional racism.

To my mind, to be woke is to embrace an expansive, inclusive, and affirmative worldview. Wokeism is a rejection not of traditional notions of patriotism, religion and history but a rejection of how those notions are defined by Christian evangelical nationalists and white supremacists.

The tension is not between secular versus sacred, it is between justice and injustice.

I disdain white Christian evangelical nationalism not because they are Christian but because it doesn’t engage issues of racism, enslavement, injustice, and inequality. I know the Gospels, they are part of my scripture as are Torah, Psalms, and Qur’an, and what the evangelicals’ race-based theology has to offer America has nothing to offer the weak, the vulnerable, the hungry — or to me.

Finally, for this is where it ends, I reject the argument that America is just in conflict over cultural issues, over library books and bathrooms, over LGBTQIA+ and abortion rights, over climate concerns, education, over gun violence and gun safety and the Second Amendment.

Yes, those issues are important. Yes, there is gang violence, mental health violence, and random violence, but that’s all just a small part of an important story that’s being ignored.

It’s about race, about institutional privilege and racism, about the persistence of sin.

It’s about white nationalist violence and its links to Christian evangelical theology. It’s about cynically exploiting the anxieties of some Americans who fear white people becoming a minority in America, about replacement theory, about hating Jews and Muslims, hating people unlike themselves.

It’s about recognizing, as has the FBI, the threat of white domestic nationalist terrorists acting against our nation, as they already have, in Oklahoma City, El Paso, Buffalo, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and at the Tree of Life / Or L’Simcha Congregation synagogue.

That’s what the guns are for. Two sides clearly understand that; the third doesn’t.

And because the third side doesn’t get it it leads to a constraint of what gets discussed in mainstream media, public arenas and private spaces, and it jeopardizes the American public’s ability to make well-informed decisions about issues of national interest, policy and political leaders.

In times like ours, such constraint can be dangerous

As I write I recognize, in moments both cerebral and carnal, that as I struggle to make sense of the threats and conflict that surround me, that the people I have come to love are built into me, and that even if that awareness arises from conflict, however painful, I love who they have helped me become.

Bound by justice and love, that is my side.

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