When Barack Obama was elected president, twice, I believed, perhaps naïvely, that the United States had changed for the better. I was never under the impression that racism had ended, or that as a country we had entered into an historic period of progressivism. It became clear in his first term that the American trend of black progress and white backlash—this time in the form of the Tea Party—would not be broken. A movement arose, with economic anxiety as its chief organizer, but with a clear white nationalist bent, in response to Obama’s arrival as president. At times, Obama himself legitimated the anger that fueled this backlash (in his now famous “A More Perfect Union” speech on race, before he was elected, Obama said, “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race….They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor...”), as either a reflection of his conciliatory ideology or as a means of self-preservation. Either way, those who were told that their frustration with this new America was understandable, that their angst and fear about creeping minority populations and entitlements, which led them to declare they wanted to “take their country back,” built the political machinery to do so.

On November 8, 2016, they achieved a crucial win in that mission, when Donald Trump won the presidential election over Hillary Clinton. They beat the pollsters, the pundits, the strategists, the media elites. They beat back Dreamers, and Occupiers, and those who believe in the value of Black Lives. They beat hope.

I cast my first ballot in a U.S. election on November 4, 2008, two days before my twenty-second birthday. I was a part of that group of young black voters that showed up to the polls in record numbers to elect the first black president. I didn’t do so with blinders on. I wanted to see a black president, having previously not believed it would happen in my lifetime, but the limits of representational politics were always clear. Electing Barack Obama would not protect black people for the worst of the criminal justice system, policing, discriminatory housing, education, and hiring practices. On January 1, 2009, when the killing of Oscar Grant at the hands Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland was captured on video, I was snatched back from the world of any good feelings. And as the names and bodies of young black people piled up—Aiyanna Stanley-Jones, Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, and so on—as violent reminders of America’s racist roots, and Obama’s responses continually disappointed, the limits of having a black president became more painfully obvious.

However, the presidency is one battle that determines the terrain on which we fight. So I again voted for Obama on November 6, 2012, my twenty-sixth birthday, not under the delusion that we simply needed four more years of a black president in order to dismantle institutionalized white supremacy, but because I believed it provided the most fertile ground on which we could do the work of shifting consciousness, organizing, and building power. I felt similarly when it was determined that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016—that there were deep ideological disagreements between her and the movements working against racial oppression, but at the very least there was an agreement on the existence of a problem, the details of which could be fought and critiqued over after she won. Then she didn’t.

There are numbers that explain the election. The biggest is turnout, as Clinton received around four million less voters than Obama did in 2012, perhaps suggesting a lack of enthusiasm for this election generally or Clinton as a candidate specifically. Included in that lower turnout is black voters, the Democratic party’s most reliable demographic group, though it’s still unclear just how a big of an impact this being the first presidential election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act had on black voter turnout. Ultimately, white people delivered the election to Trump, backing him at 58 percent, with only 37 percent of white people supporting Clinton.

"The first black president is in charge of a peaceful transition of power to a man who questioned his citizenship, was endorsed by the KKK, and has now selected a proud white nationalist as his chief strategist. That’s almost too American."

But those explain how Trump won. The number that concerns me, and would have even if he had lost, is 60,371,676—the current popular vote tally for Trump. Sixty million people watched a man wage an explicitly racist campaign and decided to cast their one vote for him. Sixty million people listened as Trump denigrate every non-white racial group in the most vile and violent terms, and either embraced him for it or decided that it didn’t matter. And where those sixty million people let it be known how they feel about our existence in the voting booth, there could be sixty million more who didn’t show up to say it out loud. What reason do they have to stay quiet now?

This week, the newsreels and photographs of President Obama meeting in the Oval Office with president-elect Trump are painful, not only seeing the strain in Obama’s face, seeing who the American people chose as his successor, but for how difficult the it is to accept the underlying symbolism. The first black president is in charge of a peaceful transition of power to a man who questioned his citizenship, was endorsed by the KKK, and has now selected a proud white nationalist as his chief strategist. That’s almost too American.

On November 8, 2016, two days after my thirtieth birthday, I felt more naïve than when I was twenty-one. I suppose I was more affected by Obama’s message of hope than I cared to admit. Because I genuinely believed, even through all that I witnessed throughout my 20s, that the terrain was shifting in a way that would make the fight just a bit easier. I thought Americans would look naked racism and bigotry in the face and reject it, at least to maintain appearances. To be wrong about this is more than a simple bruise to the ego, or a temporary knock on optimism. To be wrong is to have not anticipated the coming danger and to feel unprepared. It is to feel the weight of fear for my body, for all us who are left vulnerable to a radicalized ideology that has now been further emboldened. It is to feel as though we failed the twenty-two year olds who casts their first ballots this year, who don’t have the opportunity to feel even that precarious sense of hope we were afforded eight short years ago.

Knowing that the fight only gets tougher from here when it felt close to unwinnable before is hard on the spirit. But it does not mean we quit. This is not a resignation, but a reflection, an attempt to place my feelings in context in order to plan for the next stage. Because that is what we must do: learn the new terrain, in order to forge ahead.

Mychal Denzel Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, and a Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute.