This article is not about the Black Lives Matter movement. This article is not about the murder of Dallas police officers. This article is about perspective. My perspective, to be specific. I am the daughter of a police officer who served his city of San Francisco for more than 30 years. My grandfather was an officer as well. I've grown up with my dad's fellow officers at my birthday parties, and I've known their children as my cousins and friends. My skin is white, and I have blonde hair and blue eyes...And I am Mexican. I have cousins and family who are Mexican, black, white and all ranges of religious and sexual orientation. Do I think it's right that my black cousins may feel victimized or endangered by police? No. Are there racist police officers? Yes. Are there also racist firefighters, doctors and teachers? Yes. Racism is still a problem, but the majority of people do not wake up in the morning and think, "I can't stand (insert race here)." That being said, the majority of police officers do not wake up in the morning and think, "I hope I get to shoot somebody today."

In my experience, police officers are the best of our society. They are the ones who risk their lives daily, to ensure that we don't have to. They are the people with the courage to face horrors the rest of us can barely contemplate, and I understand that my experience is not everybody else's, and that breaks my heart. I wish my black cousins and other black Americans could feel the way I do. However, deciding to feed into the rhetoric that all police officers who shoot a black man are racist is part of the problem, not the solution. Not all police shootings may be justified, but not all "victims" of police shootings are the innocent martyrs that social media touts them to be. There will always be subsets of bad people in every group, but deciding to judge the masses by the few is ignorant and sad.

Let's try and remember who comes to our homes when we are scared and in trouble, who guards our streets and watches over our neighborhoods. Police officers run towards trouble, when we run away. We don't have to blame black people to stand by police officers, and we don't have to vilify police to support black people. All human beings matter. It is not a betrayal of one group to support another. Police officers give to us more than we know; a little understanding is needed on both sides.