As a 30-year-old Black woman from Georgia, I’ve grown up in a world where the relationship between the Black community and law enforcement has often been fraught with tension. From an early age, I knew that encounters with the police could be vastly different depending on the color of your skin. But it wasn’t until I truly immersed myself in Africana Studies, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the public administration field that I began to understand the deep, systemic roots of these tensions—and what we can do to change them.