After the election I noticed that my black friends and colleagues were less astonished and indignant than my white liberal friends, though no less dismayed. This has led me to four thoughts.

First: Oh, right. This is an America black people recognize. Obama might have been President, but the governor of Mississippi still doesn’t give a rodent’s rear for the black population of this state whose flag still flaunts the Confederate emblem. Dylann Roof was pre-Trump, not a newcomer, and black parents around the country have been teaching kindergarten kids how not to get shot by the cops for decades now. I suppose it makes a change from teaching them to get off the sidewalk, but not that much of a change.

It’s just (some) white liberals who are all shocked. (So yes, I felt kind of naïve.)

Second: African Americans have a lot to teach the rest of America about being in it for the long haul. The rest of us have a lot to learn about how to stay sane, how to set goals, and how to organize to meet them. This is a ground war.

Third: Lots of white liberals are mentioning how hard it is to stay healthy and productive in this political climate. All that extra time and energy consumed in reading and responding to the news, organizing an event or two or three–late to work, short on sleep, distraught and furious and scared… Welcome to the world many Americans have lived in all along. Those of us who thought we didn’t have to worry about our government actively attacking us and our friends and families—let’s use this experience to help us begin to understand how discrimination can systematically undermine the emotional and physical health of entire communities.

Fourth: After the election I heard / read some harsh language from liberals about groups that “should have” been more active, more politically engaged, more effective in getting out the vote. Setting aside the many other reasons this complaint is unjust, I’ll just say, I’ll be using my newfound sense of weary Sisyphean struggle and looming threat to help me think about what it feels like to be still protesting this same old stuff that you protested when you were younger, that your parents protested, that your grandparents protested, and that has been killing your family and friends since, oh, maybe 1700, give or take a century. No one group can do all the heavy lifting for themselves and then be told on top of that that they should have been helping someone else, too.

To those reading this who are African American, or belong to other groups that have been threatened and marginalized and dispossessed and killed all along—to whom this is not a new situation—I apologize for every time I’ve complained about my recent burden of insecurity, because complaining about it implied that I had assumed that I should forever belong to a protected group, and that fighting injustice was something I did on other people’s behalf, for extra credit. I was wrong. So I’m starting a local chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).