Early on election evening, my Muslim friends and I jokingly imagined the world after a Trump victory, where Muslim Americans were herded into camps, wondering whether we would have Wi-Fi there and who would water our plants after we’d gone. When the results began pouring in, the jokes stopped.

Anxiety replaced humour. My friends and I began exchanging furious messages. “Can you believe this shit?” a Yemeni friend asked. The shock turned to horror. We began discussing how to explain this all to our children, some of whom are already showing signs of internalising the country’s anti-Muslim sentiment.

This, the most frightening time of my life, is something I should have seen coming. On Monday I was talking with some of my students at Brooklyn College about what they expected would happen in the election, and they shocked me by launching into their stories of personal encounters in liberal New York with Donald Trump’s America.

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A young African American woman told me she worked at a bank on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she has often had to deal with an older, belligerent white woman. But the last time this woman came into the bank, she began yelling at my student, threatening her and screaming that my student would no longer be working there after Trump was elected. I was appalled by the story, but the other students merely nodded knowingly.

Another then told me he had recently witnessed an encounter between two older people – a Latina and a white male – on a New York City bus. The older white man grew irrationally angry when the Latina’s bag was briefly blocking the aisle, screaming that Trump would make sure she was no longer allowed in America.

The ideology of whiteness in America is not going to bed without a fight

And another young Muslim student told me she worked in daycare at a local mosque, and how the little five- to seven-year-old kids now repeatedly asked her – with those large, innocent, heartbreaking eyes – if they would have to leave the US once Trump was elected.

How, in the name of all that is decent and honest in this world did we let this happen? Over the next days, weeks and months, we will listen to all the ways the pollsters, pundits and partisans skewed our understanding of this election. We’ll hear how we underestimated working-class anger at the establishment, how Hillary Clinton failed to get young people and African Americans to vote. We’ll hear every conceivable variation of how Clinton lost this election, and not a single one of them will offer the simple truth that the US, like much of the rest of the world, would rather destroy itself than recognise the reality that it is changing.

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As a country, we have rejected robotic Clinton for the sexual predator Trump. To deny that patriarchy plays a role here is to be blind to the sun burning your eyes. But what this election also shows, what it will painfully bring out over the next four years, is that the ideology of whiteness in America is not going to bed without a fight. At the moment, there are more non-white babies born in this country than white ones, and that fact seems to have mobilised enough voters to place a candidate who freely espouses racist ideas into the highest office not just of this country but of the world.

We are scared of Trump and scared of the Islamophobia his victory articulated. From today, Muslim Americans are looking over their shoulders when they walk down the street. But the “let’s move to Canada” gags circulating on social media were not made by my Muslim American friends. It’s a luxury to make that joke. We need to face this head on. We are not discussing flight, we need to fight.

For Muslims, immigrants, people of colour, and all our young children too, we are looking squarely into a new and desperate reality. Trump has said so many horrible things about so many of us. If only for credibility’s sake, and not even for satisfying the thirst of his followers, he will have to attempt some of his policy proposals, won’t he? My Muslim friends and I are terrified. And that’s completely rational. But, we also decided, we can’t be intimidated. We are part of this country and we will do everything we can to battle for its heart and soul, which after this election America seems perilously close to losing.