Race relations seem to be on the news every minute of every day, and I didn't picture that this would be a reality of mine and others at this point in my life. Of course, it isn't my reality. It's the reality of my peers. And that has become so much more chilling and real in the past few weeks as I have started college.

It's always what you hear on the news or you see in a headline in the paper. We just saw the tragic incident in North Carolina ending with the death of Keith Lamont Scott at the hands of the police. It's almost never-ending. But getting a text from your roommate while you're sitting in your dorm about something that happened at the Starbucks on campus just hours before is an entirely different feeling than watching the news.

And then you watch the video, and suddenly you're wondering not about why that happened to a random unarmed black man somewhere across the country, but why that happened to a random black man on your own campus, just a short walk from where you go to sleep each night.

The situation at San Diego State was a unique one. And I can still remember the chills I felt when I read about it. When it came down to it, the man involved wasn't a student and the video is unclear. In it, we see a black man being asked (outside of the Starbucks at our Student Union) to sit down, and upon not cooperating, being forced to the ground and pinned by officers. Only people who were truly there know what happened to him and how it went down exactly. Later, reports detail that he was behaving erratically, and the police responded in the best way they thought necessary to keep students safe. Our president was very quick to respond, did so thoroughly, and the situation died down. In any event, responding is a tough thing to do for a student and understanding it all is tough too.

I'm a white female so I can't say I understand any of this. But I've always been for the Black Lives Matter movement and shocked at the recent events surrounding police brutality and the deaths of unarmed, innocent black men and women in our country.

But now it's on my own campus, somewhere I just moved to a month ago, and it's totally different. Why did they need three officers to hold this guy down? Why did he have to be put in such a position that he cried out about his arm breaking? Why did they need him to sit down on the ground in the first place? I want to understand the police department policies and what was happening with this man but it's hard to.

And before I could even seemingly stop and reflect on what had happened, it was all happening again, and again it was here in my new city. In El Cajon, a suburb of San Diego, Alfred Olango, a 38-year-old black man was killed by police in the parking lot of a restaurant after police reported to have confronted his behavior. Four shots were caught on video. His family and lawyers claim he was having a mental breakdown, and bystanders shouted to the officer not to shoot. Other reports indicate he made gestures with a vape pen when confronted by officers.

Again, it's hard to understand and respond. But is it really all that difficult? A man is dead. Another was faced with extreme brutality and abuses by authority.

It's just so troubling to see this happening over and over again, and it reinstates the idea in my mind that this issue is so widespread when it happens right where I live. Everyone that I talk to about this has the same response to my anger- maybe he was making the officer feel unsafe, maybe he was on drugs, maybe he was armed. I understand these ideas and recognize them, and I know each of these cases are truly complex.

But when it comes down to it, why do we ask those questions first? The most important thing we should ask is why did another community member have to die? Why did the police have to so brutally force the man on our campus to the ground? And why should students be taking time away from their studies to hang Black Lives Matter banners on our main hall? Because they shouldn't have to. They should be able to feel safe, feel equal, and feel acknowledged in our campus and surrounding community. It just isn't right.

And truly, when we see the deaths of innocent black people in our nation, is it all that complex? Do we need to analyze the videos or interview the bystanders or spend weeks talking about it? Sure we do, but can't we recognize that the most important idea here is that someone is dead at the hands of the people who are supposed to understand and protect us?

Are we making excuses? Why aren't we able to recognize that institutionalized racism is such a great force in the American spirit STILL, and why can't we stand up and fix this? Is it all that hard? If we're truly the land of the free, home of the brave -- why aren't we brave enough to stand up for our black brothers and sisters?

Maybe I've oversimplified this. But maybe that's simply the response that I have to the confusion facing our communities. I'm not anti-cop. And I know that being white I can hardly fathom this reality. But in trying to, I understand that it isn't just a reality- it's a media swarm, months of tweets, changing evidence, and new kinds of uproar that have revealed racism at the core of our American foundation time and time again.

Something must be done.