This is also the first election of my life where my own vote and opinions so directly affect the lives of other people. My wife and I are expecting a child sometime in April, and I’m left thinking about how whatever just happened will affect his life. By Trump’s own promises, our son might be subject to the world-eating black box of stop-and frisk for no reason. The carceral state that threatened my well-being might also consume him. He might see his own rights of expression that I use to defend him rolled back. Perhaps the most frightening idea for me is not the fanciful visions of mass violence that many have conjured, but the anxiety that I might fail to provide something better to my children than what I had the misfortune to experience. Am I providing opportunity, or just passing on a curse? I wrestle with the idea that I have failed to defend my son even before he takes his first breath.

One day I’m going to look that boy in the eye and have to explain the same thing my father did to me, and his grandfather to him. This is who we are. I know now that the wisdom of black fatherhood comes with a burden of sorrow.

But what I also know is that America is a multiplicity of wes, of collective nouns and spaces of all sorts. When I remember my tears for Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, I also remember the young black protesters who traveled thousands of miles in buses and cramped cars to protest in clouds of tear gas and force the country to confront its history of brutality of black bodies. When I hear about voter suppression, I also think back to the dozens of activists who worked tirelessly to restore voting rights. When I recall the birther movement, I also recall Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, delivered in a sea of waving signs. I still feel the infectious energy after the crowd heard her now-famous phrase “when they go low, we go high,” and the radiance from black girls and grandmothers alike at collecting her signs hours after she’d left the building.

When I worry about whether diversity and relations between races can ever be sustained, I think about my job here. I think about my editor, Yoni Appelbaum, and my colleague and mentor Ta-Nehisi Coates. I think about this diverse and diversifying newsroom of races, genders, sexual orientations, backgrounds, and views, and a media landscape that has seen multiple renaissances of thought and work from people of color. I think about the fact that the popular vote of this election belongs to one of the most diverse coalitions of voters in American history, and that regardless of party or creed, the most vulnerable people among us now form some of the most powerful voting blocs in the country. That’s not nothing.

It’s fair to wonder if the forces and fighters arrayed against bigotry will ever share in a total victory. Perhaps the well is just too deep, and America will always return to what it has been, regardless of how far it is stretched and progressed. It’s fair to wonder if the Trump coalition’s Great America will involve returning to some time or era to which not all of us can safely return. Of those matters I am agnostic; history and hope are often at odds.