(Photo by Steven)

Tanveer Huq was one Metro stop from getting back to his home in Hyattsville, engaged in the time-honored commute tradition of zoning out while cocooned in the silence afforded by a pair of headphones.

Two days after the election, he took little notice when an elderly white man wearing a Make America Great Again hat sat down next to him. But at a certain point, Huq realized that the man was talking at him. So he pulled out his headphones and listened.

“And he goes ‘you better get ready to go back to your home country,'” Huq recalls.

In shock, he gave the man a smile and put his earbuds back in. At the next station, Huq wished the man a good day and got off. He didn’t tell his wife for a full day and has spent the week since trying to process what happened—and what the next few years will be like.

“Now I feel like I need to be more aware of other people,” says Huq, who was born in Bangladesh but moved to the Maryland suburbs of the District when he was just one year old. “I am an atheist from a immigrant, Muslim family in an interracial marriage who people mistake for Mexican—I’m getting hit in a lot of ways” by the rhetoric of white supremacists.

Two other people on the train were in earshot. They shook their heads, but didn’t speak up.

Although D.C. and the suburbs overwhelmingly repudiated the president-elect at the polls, it is one more incident in a growing list of hate-filled encounters that people of color have endured in the days following the election.

It isn’t even the only anti-immigrant tirade on the Green line in recent days. “It’s America. Welcome to America,” an unidentified man yelled in a crowded car to a person off camera last Friday. A bystander told the Washington Post that the target of this rage appeared to be of man of Southeast Asian descent. “Does he know what deodorant is? Is he ever going to wear some, in America?”

“It used to be that hey, you’re being racist—it’s not ok,” says Huq, a services support specialist at the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Now it’s like, hey you’re being racist, but guess what? It’s shared by so many people and it’s coming back in style.”

Huq’s experience has been mirrored across the country—the Southern Poverty Law Center has logged hundreds of accounts of harassment—and around the region. When Karthik Subramanian was walking home from the Courthouse Metro station last week, a veteran came up to him and said: “You know. I didn’t go Vietnam to serve you. It’s a good thing you’ll all be gone… it’ll be great again soon.””

When Huq finally told his wife, who is white, what had happened to him, she said she was glad she wasn’t there; she didn’t know how she would have reacted. So she asked her husband how to handle the situation if she witnesses something like that.

“I don’t even know,” Huq says, fearing the possibility of violent confrontation. “I was trying to think of someone else who wasn’t so thick-skinned or if the situation escalated, what would I do? I still don’t have an answer for that.”