Tonight, I met a partner who works with my company on a temporary project for Caribbean food for dinner. I had no idea how old he was before finally meeting him in person (we’d been on video chat many times before finally meeting in person today), but when he told me that he literally graduated from college this past December, our age gap suddenly hit me, and I felt a bit old sitting across from him while chewing on my jerk chicken and plantains.

With his Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage and my Chinese Vietnamese heritage, we ended up talking a lot about race and how it’s perceived in different parts of this country. He grew up in Georgia and Florida but now lives in San Francisco, and while I have always lived on one of the coasts, I’ve definitely been many times to the deep South and the Midwest, where people who look like me are not always the norm. Now that he lives in San Francisco, he said it’s almost like being in a different country than where he grew up, where races didn’t intermingle much and race pretty much determined what your life would be like. But even in his own community and own family, Trump supporters can be found. And people repeatedly defend him.

This is the America we live in, where people continue to vote against their own self interests but think they aren’t. Maybe we really get what we deserve.