I'm not one to write about current events and my opinions on them all that often, and that's for a couple reasons: 1) We live in a culture already super-saturated with voices. 2) I am a natural-born empathizer, which means that I tend to see and understand every side of an issue with painfully brutal clarity. It also means that it's really hard for me to come to conclusions on things. 3) Putting my opinion out there is scary because it means that I am willing to have people push back, with big words, statistics, and biting sarcasm to boot. Some people thrive in those situations. I tend to wither.

With that being said, I've been writing and rewriting drafts of this article on my own personal blog long before I started writing for Odyssey. This is over a year in the making. The deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, along with the fatal shootings in Dallas, just pushed me to finally publish it.

Let's talk about race and lives mattering in the U.S.

Race is such a crazy thing, isn't it? There are so many things that identify us, but our race, though just one of those identifiers, plays a huge role in our day-to-day lives, whether we realize it or not. Within mere seconds of seeing a person for the first time, their race immediately begins to shape the way we perceive them, and conversely, how we ourselves are perceived by those around us.

The heartbreaking stories that have taken over the news in the past few days have made a few things overwhelmingly clear to me. First of all, there seems to be an undeniable correlation between the blackness of a person's skin and how quickly police officers are willing to shoot them. Secondly, I am realizing more and more every day that police officers have incredibly difficult jobs that are only getting harder with the heightening tension in our nation. Thirdly, I know that I am so tired of crying over the videotaped deaths of my black brothers and sisters.

There are so many things that could be said about the events that have occurred this week, and to widen the lens a little further, what has happened in the past two years. Here's my piece, specifically as it pertains to the #___LivesMatter hashtags.

I firmly and unflinchingly believe that all lives matter, but I have seen far too many people use the #AllLivesMatter hashtag with scalding amounts of spite in response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The same goes for #PoliceLivesMatter. I have seen some people use that hashtag well, but the majority of the time, people are using it as a biting counter to #BlackLivesMatter.

I fully support the #BlackLivesMatter movement because I think it is incredibly important. I think that, in a society where the death of black people is becoming increasingly commonplace, the fact that black lives do matter should ring more poignantly in our ears than ever. I do hope that our lives mattering never pushes any of us as black people to replicate what was done in Dallas because that was a cruel and unacceptable act. Period. Police lives will always matter. That being said, I think a lot of people look at events like that and want to use it as a way to invalidate the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Here's an example of what I totally would not be surprised to see if I logged on to Twitter right now: "Oh look, 5 police officers shot and killed in Dallas. Love that that's what #BlackLivesMatter means for the rest of us."

And that's where I run into my major issue with all of this. #BlackLivesMatter is not an anti-cop initiative, nor is it an anti-white or anti-anyone else initiative. It is not meant to be demeaning, diminishing, or excluding. Rather, at its core, I believe that it is meant to unify - to assert that black lives matter just as much as anyone else, which is a sentiment that I hope every person I know would be willing to stand behind. And that, my friends, brings me to my final point.

Black lives mattering and police lives mattering does not have to be mutually exclusive. It does not have to be an either/or situation. Black lives should matter to you just as much as police lives do, and vice versa, and if they don't, I would venture to say that you are using one hashtag to stomp on another.

To my #AllLivesMatter folks, I want you to know that, whether you are white, black, Latino/a, or Asian, your life matters to me, and I hope you never think or feel otherwise. I also want you to know that all lives can't matter until my life and the life of my black brothers and sisters matters just as much to you.

Writing this article has been a privilege and an honor and, as a verbal processor, has served as a way for me to untangle how I feel about what is happening in our world amidst the inescapable and constant barrage of emotions, voices, and opinions that flood my TV and my timelines.

If there is one thing that I know for sure, it is this: taking into account every single thing that makes each of us who we are, we all uniquely reflect the imago Dei - the image of God - and we should value each other as such. With that frame of mind, we should be quick to mourn the loss of human life, no matter what the context surrounding it may be. Selling CDs outside of a convenience store? We should mourn. Driving with a broken tail light? We should mourn. Partying at a gay nightclub? We should mourn. Working as a police officer during a protest? We should mourn. I think we can get caught up in the context of the situation and forget to mourn the death of a person created in the image of God, and if we can't lay down our thoughts and feelings on the event and do that, where does that leave us?