That could be our kids: For Spielman family, racism and inequality hit home -

Rick and Michele Spielman saw the same excruciating video as millions of others, watching as George Floyd’s life was ended despite his pleas for air because the knee of a white police officer plunged into his neck for more than eight minutes.

They sat in silence the first time they saw the video together. They’d watched similar videos in fear and anger over the years as dozens of other black men were killed by officers. But this was different. This was Minnesota, their home, and this was the Minneapolis Police Department, the one that reports to Vikings games on Sundays in the fall.

The Vikings general manager looked over at his wife on the couch and watched the tears stream down her face. She looked back at him and mustered the crushing words they’d both been thinking.

“That could be our kids,” Michele said.

Rick and Michele weren’t able to have a child on their own and decided in the late 1990s that they’d adopt. The road through adoption was a winding one full of disappointing phone calls and disheartening visits.

But, finally, in 1998 when Rick was working for the Bears, they learned that a trip through the pouring rain on the South Side of Chicago matched them with two brothers, their first kids. The children were black. Rick and Michele are white.

They hadn’t thought much about what would happen if they were matched during the adoption process with children of a different race. They just wanted a family.

But they also wanted to take their role as parents of black children seriously. They studied black history, hopeful they’d one day be able to help their children understand and celebrate their heritage.

In those early years, when their family was smaller than it is today, Rick and Michele read a book to the boys about tiger parents who raised leopard cubs.

“We were just trying to get them to understand whether you have stripes or you have spots, we’re still one family,” Rick said in an interview Thursday. “What you look like doesn’t matter. What matters is the love we have.”

In the years that followed, Rick and Michele adopted four more children, all of them black. The youngest has special needs.

The early years could be tough. Passersby often gave double looks at the six black children following white parents. The parents had tried, of course, to be prepared for how their family dynamic might change their perception in the eyes of strangers.

“But you can’t prepare yourself for the emotions you feel when you experience it firsthand,” Rick said.

They noticed it more as the oldest children became teenagers. When kids are young, Rick noted, they all play with each other and most don’t pay much mind to who hangs out with whom.

JD Spielman, one of Rick and Michele’s first adopted sons, was a standout wide receiver at Nebraska the past two seasons before entering the transfer portal earlier this month. (Bruce Thorson / USA Today)

But even little things, like trips to the mall, started to yield frustration as the years went by. When the family was together, they didn’t get any trouble from authorities. They were just another family walking through stores.

But when the kids asked to go through a store on their own, things changed. Inevitably, they’d come out upset. Another security guard had followed them around the store until they decided to leave.

“They’re exposed to two different worlds,” Rick said of his children. “The white privilege world with us, and then the world they live in when they’re not with us.”

It’s led to more serious instances in recent years. Rick hesitates to share too many details, the story still raw, but this much he’ll reveal: His son was once driving in Michele’s car, a luxury vehicle that comes with a high price tag. Police pulled over the car. They asked the son where the car came from. How does someone like him get something like that? The incident didn’t end until the son got Michele on the phone. She cleared to the officer that, yes, this was her son, and, yes, he had permission to drive the car.

“It made us look at the world through the lens of their eyes,” Rick said of raising black children. “It gave us a whole different perspective on life.”

That perspective puts Rick in a unique position with the Vikings at a unique point in time as his organization on Wednesday announced initiatives to support social justice causes following Floyd’s death. It’s also come into play at home as the children have grown into young adults. Conversations around the dinner table have gotten more serious and more important as questions of how to combat systemic racism are raised.

Rick and Michele hear from their children about how different their lives are than what their parents experienced as white teenagers. When the children’s black friends come over, they echo those experiences.

It’s hard, of course, for Rick and Michele to hear all of this, to learn how different their children’s lives are when the white parents are around versus when they’re not. Then, the parents think of what happened to Floyd, and of all the people of color who have been victims of police brutality.

In moments like the last two weeks, Michele’s words hang in the air. This could have been one of their children.

“They live in the white privilege world when they’re with our family, then they experience a whole different world,” Rick said. “They’ve experienced racism and they’ve experienced inequality.”

(Photo: Zach Bolinger / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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