Scared to be Indian, Muslim, brown: Trump's victory has many sharing fears online

'My parents came here because it's the home of the free. For the first time in my life, I'm scared to be an Indian American.'
Scared to be Indian, Muslim, brown: Trump's victory has many sharing fears online
Scared to be Indian, Muslim, brown: Trump's victory has many sharing fears online
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In a historic win, Republican candidate Donald Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton to be elected as the 45th President of the United States of America. Throughout his campaign, Trump made many statements that were widely condemned as racist, sexist, and white-supremacist. 

As the election was called in Trump's favour, many immigrants, women, Muslims and people of color took to social media to reveal the fear they suddenly felt in a country that has always prided itself on its diversity.

One Twitter user, a Muslim Indian-American woman, said she was so scared that she had anxiety attacks and broke down as Trump's win was imminent.

Some people said they were afraid to go about their daily lives, since they were scared of being targeted in public.

Kunnal Nayyar, the actor known for playing Raj on "The Big Bang Theory" tweeted, "If you look like me - you'd better start shaving your beard every day."

For persons of colour from the LGBTQ+ community, the fear was doubly present.

A Facebook user posted a status late Wednesday night describing the "hardest class" of her life, where she was teaching Introduction to Social Justice to a class of students, almost all of them persons of colour. She asked them then about how they felt (post the election presumably), and the answers she got, after a brief silence were:

"I'm so scared." "Terrified." "Devastated." "Scared." "Disappointed." "Afraid." "Worried." "So confused."

 The teacher then asked them why, and they started recounting their experiences. Here are excerpts from her post:

"A young black woman said, ‘My mother called me this morning and said, this means you need to keep your voice down in public, and you need to work ten times harder than you already are, because it's going to be this much harder for you.’ She began to cry and shake."

"Another young woman, white, said her mother was at the local grocery store. A man approached her and asked if she (the mother) would be voting for Trump. She said no. He said, ‘Well, I’ll have to take you outside to show you some of his moves in the parking lot so you’ll change your mind.’"

"A young trans student, hoping to transition this year, said now they think it’s impossible. ‘I feel like I don’t have a body.’"

"A young Black man said his best friend goes to Penn State and has already been in five altercations around the things Trump says about race. His voice wavers."

The teacher writes that all of them cried. When she hugged them, she could "could feel their bodies heaving, their hearts beating out of their chests".

Read her full post here.

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