Last Friday some friends and I took in some live music. While not much of a dancer myself, I’ve always admired the impact music can have in bringing people together.

As part of a joke that carried over from a previous experience at the same establishment, my friends and I brought Canadian flags with to wave at the band members, a couple of whom were in on the joke. It turned out to be a great source of goofiness, something I’m often wont to take part.

What made it even more personally goofy was my wife’s discovery a day earlier I’m one-eighth (or some similar percentage) Canadian, which could explain my fondness for The Red Green Show and Celine Dion songs. This being a new revelation, I’m still coming to grips with who I am, historically speaking, and what, if anything, it means for my future.

For starters, I waved that Canadian flag with a little more verve last Friday, which makes me ponder something. Would I have waved it with the same level of verve had it been a Mexican flag? The best answer I can give is I certainly hope so.

My fear may reveal a shallowness about me, but here goes: I fear waving a Mexican flag may have resulted in some less-than-affable responses. That I care what others might think of what flag I wave is my problem, certainly. The broader concern: I envision it wouldn’t have been as acceptable to wave a flag of our neighbor to the south, Mexico.

According to a Canadian census Web site, about three-quarters of the country’s population speak English. That’s the predominant language where I live. Most Canadians resemble me. Many of their cultures mirror mine. Their familial customs and structures fall in step with those of many families living around me.

Yet that doesn’t make me white and others wrong. It’s differences such as I’ve mentioned above — and certainly many others — that make people more uncomfortable with Mexican national pride than with Canadian national pride. We want to be inclusive, because being inclusive is the right thing to do, but, it seems, only when it doesn’t come at the expense of our own comfort zones.

Someone once said education doesn’t happen in a comfort vacuum, it only happens once you step outside that safety net and find your prior held beliefs challenged. Unfortunately, that’s not where enough of us are in our relationship with our Mexican brethren.

Within minutes of this hitting the Tribune’s Web site you can be assured the anonymous fleet will fire off statistics saying why compassion is not the right answer, while some of the world’s most effective leaders continue to reiterate there is no other way to true enlightenment than sympathy and compassion. For every one of their negative stories about Mexican immigrants I could find a story equally horrifying involving no one of color. That’s the information age we live in.

But this shouldn’t be a battle of who can find the most negative information. Let’s dwell on the positive things we’ve gained by being a diverse nation. An Albert Lea student of Mexican descent wrote a letter last year to President Obama and received a response a couple months ago. The following was from a story in the March edition of Ahlahasa, Albert Lea High School’s nearly century old student newsmagazine, about the letter exchange: “Last January sophomore Sergio Salgado felt impassioned enough to write to the President of the United States. … He wrote the president asking for advice on how to increase diversity in his city and his school. Salgado wrote about the difficulties of trying to succeed when you belong to a minority and asked for tips on how he could also succeed as Obama did.”

Salgado is a wonderful young man who should be lauded for his goals of bringing more diversity to this city. We should all be supportive of that goal.

My wife should also be lauded (but what’s new there, eh). She dove head first into discovering her ancestry. I think it takes guts to go digging into your family history. I’ll explain in a bit why I find that brave.

She’s been inspired by the Henry Louis Gates special on public television, which is gaining such high interest levels that Lisa Kudrow has created a spin off called “Who Do You Think You Are?,” both of which give celebrities information about their ancestors. Some of the information is rather shocking.

Gates does in-depth background checks, which include DNA tests, to tell subjects the breakdown of their heritage. The Harvard professor, who’s now well known for his argument last year with police who accused him of breaking into his own house, has always considered himself to be black. In testing himself he discovered he’s more than 50 percent European.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who became famous as an Oprah guest and now has his own show, is of Turkish descent. Gates recently discovered Oz shares a relative with Mike Nichols (director of the movie The Graduate), who is Jewish.

I mentioned I consider my wife brave for doing this delving. Many times families’ oral histories are altered or changed to fit the predominant ethnicity in power in a given region. That is the case for my wife’s family. At some point she was told her family was Norwegian. Numerous family members were shocked to hear they are partially Native American, of the Wampanoag tribe, the tribe remembered for its involvement in the original Thanksgiving. My wife’s grandmother was not excited to hear that. Why? It made her uncomfortable to find out a couple days prior to her 90th birthday she was Indian. You figure it out.

I’ll leave you with this story. My wife’s best friend’s grandfather learned English in school. He was German. Today, he’d be in an English Language Learners program getting the help he needed to be successful, and, hence, unfairly pigeonholed for not knowing the predominant U.S. language. But because he’s of European descent he is forgiven for that.

Just as I was forgiven for waving my Canadian flag Friday night.

Albert Lea resident Riley Worth is a teacher at Albert Lea High School. He can be reached at rileyworth@gmail.com.