At about 11 p.m. on Election Day, my denial slipped away. At a watch party at one of the “safe space” bars in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, election results were rolling in on several screens. The mood of elation, hope, and excitement was fading. By the end of the night, sleep was almost impossible for many of the people I know.

The next night, I saw something I never thought I would see in my community: police turning on peaceful protesters. Not because I didn’t think it was possible, but because I hoped it wasn’t. We were marching in an anti-Trump rally through the Old Market, an area where people go to relax and escape. It’s a beautiful, old district crossed with brick roads and historic buildings. With ivy crawling up the walls and flowering vines that drip their sweetness on tourists and residents alike, the district is usually the epitome of picturesque, quaint peace.

I had just gotten to the heart of the protest, where several young people had kneeled in the intersection. My heart in my throat, I moved in front of the police cruiser inching steadily toward the teenagers in the street.

When we ushered the flustered kids to the sidewalks, cops in body armor tried to intimidate us into leaving with threats of arrest. When that didn’t work, they shot off several rounds of “pepper bullets”—which release a chemical similar to pepper spray—at our feet.

As I looked the cop opposite me dead in the eye—me terrified and him visibly flushed—he lifted his gun. Suddenly, a white man ran and blocked me from the police officer. He was arrested immediately for unlawful assembly and disturbing the peace. For shielding me.

Less than a minute later, I watched a group of white cops shoot these young protesters in the back as they were running away. I watched them shoot kids. Right after I had watched them shoot the white man who had moved in front of me. And yes, they were shooting pepper bullets. No one, as far as I’m aware, was seriously injured. But to know that the people there to protect and serve were more than willing and ready to pull the trigger in one of the most highly visited areas of town, in front of cameras, completely demolished any illusion of civility or delusion of a reasonable reality.

I watched a group of white and Latinx teenagers heckle and bully protesters because they felt empowered to. I had to stand idly by as these kids joked whether they wanted to grab me by the pussy—like President-elect Donald Trump said he had done to women—until one said I was too ugly because, “She looks like an ape.” I had no doubt that defending myself would have been seen as a violent aggression. I have lived a lifetime combating the angry Black woman trope, so I recognize the situational triggers for it.

Since then, social media followers, friends, and even random strangers have said that I brought that incident on myself for being too angry. Too confrontational. “Why can’t you just chill out?” Trump supporters have stalked my public social media profiles and harassed my loved ones. But I’m the angry Black woman, still.

Since Election Night, the protest, and the trolling, I’ve been trying to figure out how to address this grief, fear, and disgust—this torrent of emotion that’s going on inside my soul. I’ve had to figure out how to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning. I’ve had to figure out how to not slip into hate. I’ve had to figure out how to find my compassion in a world where the majority of Americans hate who I am. I have had to figure out how to look white people in the face as I passed them on the street, in coffee shops, or in meetings when all I feel is anger, frustration, and pain. I’ve had to figure out how to tell people how to hold their heads high because somehow, some way, I became a representative of the movement, of the ideologies, of the inclusion and liberation they believe in. I have had to reassess what I define as self-care because I never anticipated having to deal with America’s gleeful regression in human rights and respect for human dignity.

I am a Black Lives Matter activist. I support the movement. I support what it stands for. I support the platform, the motivation, and the goals. I support the emotions that the movement rose out of because its catalysts were grief and righteous intolerance of injustice. I support the conversations it has sparked in my community and in America. I believe that the movement had, until last Tuesday, been making influential progress in the conversation about race, policing, and ethics—a conversation that, for so long, could only hit surface level due to white fragility and privilege, colonialism, and anti-Blackness. I love that the movement I champion also has intentionally built and maintained space to stand alongside other movements for change.

What is absolutely heartbreaking is that with Donald Trump as president, I believe our progress will not only stall but start to go backward. The police state that Donald Trump wants to enforce in marginalized communities is an absolutely real and valid threat to the quality of life of Black Americans, all people in the United States (including those who voted for him), and the world.

On Tuesday on a Facebook Live video with Al Jazeera English, I was having a conversation about public transportation, food deserts, access to opportunity, and increasing the quality of life in Black communities. On Wednesday morning, after the election, I had a conversation with a colleague about how to survive when America has elected the most unapologetically racist, misogynist, xenophobic, ableist presidential candidate in recent history. We are all terrified, and with good reason.

Activists focusing on many of the major issues in our community and the country—LGBTQIA+ rights, indigenous rights and #NODAPL, prison reform, #BlackLivesMatter, Latinx rights, immigration reform, religious tolerance, and other paths—are organizing together to fight. We are coming together to change this country once and for all. We’re dismantling the need for individual leaders to speak on behalf of our communities; as evidenced by this current election, we have had people speaking for us for far too long and to our detriment.

Now in 2016, words Frederick Douglass spoke in 1857 still reverberate deeply with many activists I know: “Power concedes nothing without demand.”

So we want to saturate the community with “demand.” We’re changing Omaha, where we have a mayor who openly supported the president-elect and refuses to address the deeply systemic disparities of power and resources in the community. For the foreseeable future, we have every intention of continuously, relentlessly protesting—peacefully—in every way that we can. Activism is everything from wearing a safety pin or staging a march through the streets to appealing for policy reform or writing on social media.

The goal, as I understand it, is to flood the world with the truth that white supremacist America has been continuously trying to silence, ignore, and squelch: that marginalized communities deserve a voice. We are weary of the dehumanization, invalidation, and horrific treatment in our society. And we will stand for it no longer.