I’m very lucky to be in the circumstances I’m in. I have white skin, blue eyes, blonde hair, and am female. In other words, I would be profiled as minimally dangerous and likely innocent. I have been confronted by police on two occasions and did not feel at all threatened on either occasion. When I was pulled over for not having my tail lights on, I didn’t worry that I would be shot as I reached into my purse to get my wallet. When I was approached for being in a park late at night, I didn’t worry I would be tackled for putting my hands in the pockets of my hoodie. Twitter user @MalcolmEcstasy tweeted, “Til you understand what it’s like to deal with racial prejudice and Officers of the law I don’t want to hear your opinion on it.” Because I have had the privilege to not experience racial prejudice myself, I get where he’s coming from. His experiences are far more important in the narrative than the third-party observations I make. It can be frustrating to me when men try to tell me about feminism, but I do embrace the men who stand with us, as I hope the black community can embrace those who stand with them.

What I’m about to say next may come across to some as an excuse, but I want to ensure you that it is not. I want to present an explanation for one of the contributing factors to the attacks on black lives in recent years. Many have fallen into a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. When a cop approaches a black man, he assumes he will be aggressive and therefore looks for those behaviors and interprets them as a threat. Likewise, when a black man sees a cop approaching, he assumes that cop will mistreat him and looks for those behaviors to interpret those as a threat to him. When you combine these two, a tension is created that has contributed to fatal circumstances. I know that profiling is a part of police work, but I highly doubt they are trained to expect aggressive, threatening behavior from all black males and should, therefore, use deadly force more willingly. I also know that this does not explain all of the police brutality and I know that fixing this alone will not put an end to it. But it’s a perspective that doesn’t blame one person or one group for these fatalities.

A while back, a story went viral that a man posted on Facebook. He told the account of getting pulled over by a police officer while he was carrying a licensed weapon. He went step-by-step through the entire encounter telling the reader how he made the officer aware he was carrying a gun and that his license was in his pocket. The officer then followed what I assume to be a procedure and had the man slowly exit the vehicle so he could check both his license and his firearm. After both checked out, the officer proceeded to inform him of his traffic violation, return his weapon and sent him on his way. This is how this should go every. single. time. I watched the Philando Castile video and from what his girlfriend was saying, it sounds like Castile was doing this. He told the officer he had a weapon and that his license was inside his wallet in his pocket. When the video actually begins, you can hear how distressed and panicked the officer is after shooting the man, yelling “f*ck” at least three times and trying to rationalize his decision to shoot. I wasn’t there to know for sure, but this evidence points me to believe that this officer acted very rashly and knew he had done something wrong. The officer acted to protect himself, but when a person doesn’t even have a weapon in hand, there must be another way to handle the situation. The Alton Sterling video provides less context, but it is still a man lying on the ground being shot. When you have two officers on top of a man, I have to believe there is a better way to get him to stop moving that doesn’t include shooting him in the chest multiple times. The entire scene bears a resemblance to the Fruitvale Station incident. If it wasn’t clear how to handle that situation back then, it should’ve been figured out in the seven years since.

I don’t know what it is going to take to make this madness stop, but something must be done. For a long time, people could pretend to ignore the issue. But when we have two major incidents that make national news in the same week, it would be ignorant to pretend we don’t need change. The action I’m calling for has nothing to do with being anti-police though. Trevor Noah made an enlightening statement about how police shootings should not come down to people being either pro-black OR pro-cop. He makes some other great points in a video you can find going viral online right now, and you should definitely check it out. However when we say you can be pro-black and pro-cop, we don’t mean for you to be like Twitter user @RannDeezNutz and say, “Just stop resisting arrest and do what the cops tell you to do and you will never have these instances of cops having to use deadly force” because that is still ignorant of the fact that the police should not have killed these men and there is clear evidence of prejudice.

So after all of this, what is the point that I am trying to make? Well, for one thing, I need Americans to stop being ignorant that there is a problem. I need you to check your privilege and realize that you don’t fully understand the experiences of others. I know that I don’t know what it feels like to be the cop or the victim in these situations. I need you to stop attacking all cops because of the actions of other cops. I saw somebody on Facebook say that the police who died in Dallas shouldn’t be surprised because death is a risk of the job. He made the analogy that he works in a restaurant and nobody weeps for him when he burns himself in the kitchen. Well if you need to see it in analogy form, if somebody were to eat at a restaurant down the street and be served harmful food because the employees weren’t adhering to proper food care protocol, you’d be pretty upset if they took it out on your restaurant and burned the whole place down. We need to learn to stand as one country and make a necessary change. The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it exists. So open your eyes to what is happening and speak out to demand the change we deserve. It is not the job of one small group to make such a big change. We must work with the police and the black community to improve. There is still hope for America; we just need to fight for it.