For a lot of people this year, but maybe especially for black people, the election seemed like a joke until it stopped being funny.

“I mean, is it even real? What’s going on?” said Corey Moore, 27, otherwise known as Memphis the Barber. At Freestyle Barber & Beauty, less than a mile from where Michael Brown was fatally shot by police in August 2014, Moore was laughing as he applied clippers to a young boy’s head. Then he sighed. “I don’t know, I just hope Trump don’t get in there, or we doomed,” he said. “I mean, Donald Trump? Are you serious? It’s funny, but it’s a lot more scary.”

Two years ago, the protests in Ferguson that followed Brown’s death galvanized African Americans—and many others—around what some see as a new civil-rights movement. Now, as a presidential election of historically divisive proportions nears conclusion, the black community has experienced it as a fresh trauma: As America’s first black president prepares to leave office, one of the major-party nominees appears to them to be not just a racist, but running on a platform of racism.