Diversity

I had a lot of trouble with this assignment because of my isolation: I have been homeschooled for most of my school life until I came to Converse this fall. I also tend to focus on my schoolwork, including practicing, at the expense of not getting to know my fellow students very well, so my past interactions with other students in music camps, in choir, and in the English 101 class I took last fall usually failed to pass the acquaintance stage and get to the point where we examined our cultural differences rather than our cultural similarities. One exception to my isolation is a discussion I had with Celeste Kahn, known to many of us music students as “Celly”, over dinner on the patio of Gee dining hall.

Celly and I were discussing how I was from New Jersey in contrast to how she was from South Carolina. Our discussion wandered from accent to the British and French influence on the South to our families’ genealogical interests. I learned that the maternal side of her family was very interested in its genealogy; it was so much so that they have papers tracing the family back to the Northumbrian Percys (of Wars of the Roses fame) and the Magna Carta. Although the northern branches of my family are not very interested in family genealogy, my North Carolinian grandmother’s family does have a similar interest in it, although our known family history does not extend nearly as far back as that of Celly’s family. What I learned from Celly is that many southern families – not just hers and mine – seem to have this increased interest in family history.