I cannot pretend to relate to George Floyd, nor to African Americans and the hardships they have endured for centuries. And I won’t repeat our editor in chief Lisa Keefe’s blog, detailing some tangible ways in which the meat industry might help in the aftermath of his murder. The only thing I’ll reiterate is that it all starts with self-reflection.

I can tell you what I know about me and my background, in this way:

Toward the end of my college days at Penn State in the late 90s’, I took an assignment to research and write about immigration as an opportunity to share with the class a part of my heritage. Having grown up so closely to my mother’s family, with half born in Ireland and half born here, I was interested in going another direction.

I remember calling my dad, a history and genealogy buff, and excitedly telling him that I was going to tell the immigration story through his/our Scottish ancestry. I’ll never forget his reply. “Well, that’s great, Tom, but there’s just one problem. We’re Scots Irish.”

I threw myself into the research, which included some of his family’s rather detailed records, and ultimately achieved a nearly perfect score for the paper and the oral presentation. I recall my father, who was never one to express such emotions, even say, “I’m proud of you.”

The distinction of our Scots Irish blood, that shared by many other white Americans including some of the country’s most famous presidents, was also a source of pride for him. It was the blood of born fighters and wanderers, well suited to tackling the new frontier.

The pages of his line’s extensive genealogical record, noting the family’s arrival in the 1700s, include points of pride, like service in the Revolutionary War. But it also has some points of shame, with some mention of slave ownership. This is something my dad never talked about.

As I've been reflecting on my memories of my dad’s life, which ended a month ago, it makes sense; he was a man, reflecting a people, in transition. As soon as he graduated college in 1959, he left his childhood home of St. Louis and moved to Chicago for good. In some ways he also put away some of his culture, which included summers spent in the backwoods of Louisiana trespassing through the woods and shooting squirrels with his cousins. Up until the year he died, my mom didn’t even know he had in her home a sizeable collection of guns, many of them gifts for special occasions like graduations.

He had some stories, though, that told of his environment and perhaps his discomfort within it. Working on his father’s building sites as a teen, he recalled being friends with black workers but drinking from segregated water supplies. He recalled his dad once imploring him to go get his rifle when some white union members were threatening his black employees. He shuddered at the thought of what would have happened — as black men were helping him and a white friend pull their car out of a ditch in Oxford, Miss. — if he had not said “yes” when some suspicious good ole boys rolled up on the scene and asked him and his friend, “You boys OK?”

I knew none of those stories when I had my first formative experience with the black-white racial conflict. I was playing with my best friend, another white kid named Mike, in our front yard when I was about 7 years old. For some reason I called Mike the “N word.” I don’t believe I even knew what it meant.

That wasn’t in the least bit an excuse for my dad, who was working in the garage and overheard it. He marched out of the garage, grabbed me and dragged me back into the garage. His eyes became daggers, his teeth gritted, and his voice went into a low growl: “If you EVER say that word again … .” I won’t repeat the other side of that sentence, but let’s just say I never gave him the opportunity to make good on his promise.

I have always had a heroic view of my dad, in that he was counter to my understanding of what was typical for the environment in which he grew up, and that he helped my mom raise my siblings and me to know that racism is wrong and to give all people the respect that we expect to receive. But I also think back to the time when I was in college, when my dad admitted to finding it odd seeing my white high school ex-girlfriend with her black boyfriend. I was surprised by this admission, and he seemed to have shocked himself in saying it. But at least he was being honest.

To be honest, my father was a far cry from his distant slave-owning relatives, and as the next generation I’m an even farther cry from my distant slave-owning relatives. But, when I see the civil unrest raised by Floyd’s murder as being at a distance from my quiet, insulated suburban world, I know that I and many other white Americans have so much further to go.

Pride and prejudice

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