I spent Tuesday night watching the election results with Arab friends. We woke the next day with a familiar feeling

I woke up on Wednesday morning to an email from someone I barely know, a white woman I met at a party this summer. The email was empty and the subject line simply read: “What a heartbreak”. She was writing to me, someone she spoke to just once for five minutes, about Donald Trump winning the US presidency.

This liberal (let’s call her Suzie) and millions of other voters are waking up with a fear that they haven’t felt this intensely in four years. And her new fear made her think of me, a random Arab she met one time. Maybe Suzie assumed that I share her fresh dread.