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By Christie Lafranchi Race Relations and You In this assignment, I'm supposed to talk about what I think of race relations in Los Angeles. Because I'm from Northern California, Marin County to be exact, I don't feel qualified to answer the question. UCLA is Los Angeles to me, so I'd like to specifically write about how I fell about race relations on campus. Segregation, in this case self-imposed, is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about relations on campus. Just walking to class, along Bruin Walk, I see separate, individual groups that don't seem to mix at all. UCLA is a diverse school, but aside from the sponsored cultural events, it doesn't seem that anyone is interested in learning from each other, which seems to defeat the purpose. My high school was very small, which meant that everyone had to know everyone else. Whether a girl was from Hong Kong, Egypt, Mexico, Korea or San Francisco, it didn't matter because the school was too small for us to put up barriers between us. At UCLA, I don't feel that I have that same chance. I understand the size difference, but I feel that unless a person of a different ethnicity happens to be on my floor in the dorms, or in a rec. class, I won't get a chance to meet them. I felt the segregation first when my freshman year roommate, who was Asian, would not talk to me because I am "white." I feel it now when I go to a party in the apartments and the crowd is 95% white. I feel it when I try to "play up" the part of me that is Mexican when I am with certain friends because it is more acceptable to them than my white side. Maybe I perpetuate it when I give in and play along, but it's the only way that seems to work. Obviously, there are exceptions to what I have said. Many of my close friends are exceptions, but that's what they are, exceptions to what seems to be the rule. I don't expect everyone to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya," this is not what I expected. I guess I had naive views about what things would be like at college, but I liked it better when the color of your skin didn't determine your group of friends. (Christie Lafranchi is a junior majoring in Anthropology.)