When I was growing up I loved to watch reruns of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, a movie in which handsome Sidney Poitier declares his love for a young woman from a white, well-to-do Philadelphia family. Both families -black and white- do everything they can to dissuade the happy couple.

But, of course, love wins out over race. In its time, the movie was groundbreaking (if corny). And as someone who grew up in a mixed-race family, I was eminded by this feel-good film of what my Jewish mother and Indian father had endured in order to be together: parental opposition, landlords who refused to rent to them, hostile stares on the street.

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? came out in 1967, the same year that the Supreme Court decided Loving vs. State of Virginia, in which a black-white couple successfully overturned antimiscegenation laws. The movie wasn't just a movie: It was a wake-up call to a racially divided America. Of course, the young male hero is the utterly impeccable suitor that no parents in their right minds would turn down. But that was the point. We all wanted to be perfect for our characteristics as individuals to matter more than our backgrounds, to melt away our differences. Fast-forward 40 years, and racial mixing is all around us.

We see it in Benetton ads and in MTV videos; we see it in the media fascination with golf champion Tiger Woods. Today, one in 25 couples is interracial; in California, it's one in 10. People in their late 20s and early 30s live in a much more mixed and blended world than their parents did, and surveys show that they are far more tolerant. Our generation is increasingly sophisticated about race; we can argue about it in seminars; we take it for granted that our professional world will be diverse.

But I am curious about what lies beneath the statistics and media images. Are people in their 20s and 30s really as tolerant as they seem? What about the touchy area of dating? Do most of us feel comfortable crossing over and perhaps considering marrying someone of a different background? And if we do take such a step, what do we encounter?

For no matter how much I loved watching Sidney Poitier win over Spencer Tracy on screen, ideals do have a way of falling apart in real life - especially when it comes to sex and dating. When I was growing up, the parents in our community marched for integration. When the black boys came over from the "other side of town" and began dating their daughters, however, a number of my friends were suddenly plucked out of public schools and put into private ones. My first serious boyfriend was black, and the girls in his neighborhood used to threaten me: Even my own Indian father was scared that his brown-skinned daughter might go the "wrong way."

Nowadays there's no simple story. Our nation itself is undergoing a massive cultural shift: In this century, white Americans are projected to become a minority; all Americans are highly mobile; and the entire country continues to absorb huge numbers of immigrants. The barriers of prejudice are persistent but constantly shifting. We live in a world of overlapping identities, subtle hierarchies, and changing gender roles. "Interracial" means many possible combinations, each carrying its own nuances and dynamics.

ACCEPTABLE CROSSOVERS

Some racial crossovers are considered more acceptable than others. One of the most common is white men with Asian women; more than half of Asian women "marry out." In fact, in the multicultural hotbed of San Francisco, Jewish-Chinese marriages have become so common that couples are jokingly dubbed "Chewish."

This combination gives rise to some white men's thinking that it's acceptable to fetishize Asian women. Every Asian woman I know can recount a story of some jerk who came up to her at a party with the glint of Oriental fantasy in his eyes. "You know those guys," Andrea, a Chinese-American writer, said to me recently. "They make you feel squeamish inside." We laughed; I knew exactly what she meant. We all shudder at the image of the Asian fetish guy who struts down the street with a dainty, silent girlfriend on his arm.

But certain men's attraction to Asian women is based on more than sexual fetish. Jason, a composer, has been seriously dating a woman from Japan. "For a lot of Caucasian men in the United States," he says frankly, "dating an Asian woman from a somewhat traditional background is like returning to the values of your parents' generation. Instead of dating a woman raised with contemporary values, it's sort of like going back to your mom in the '50s or '60s."

Jason doesn't see his choice as a step backward, however. He says that in such a fast-paced culture, it's hard to juggle careers and home life, so becoming involved with someone with a stronger sense of family and community is a welcome respite. "What I see around me in this country is a premium placed on the individual, on one's own career and one's own life," he explains. "That doesn't leave a lot of space for sharing a life with someone. Traditional cultures place value on cooperating with your family, your partner, your children. Asian women are raised with more emphasis on family. For a white male, it's comforting to be with someone who holds that important and gives you the space to let that be important."

On the other side, many Asian women say crossing over allows them a different kind of freedom. An immigrant family can be a pressure cooker of professional and familial demands. Often, Asian women are expected to kowtow to their families' traditions. An Americanized man may be more flexible and open to equality, while the spoiled son of Chinese or Indian immigrants might expect his new wife to wait on him as his mother did. Many Asian women fear that being with an Asian man will bring out all of the traditional patterns they'd hoped to flee. Dating someone who brings none of those presumptions to the relationship can be a relief.

Menon, who is of Indian descent, teaches music composition and writing at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a campus with a large Asian student population. He observes that young Asian women are often partly in school to find a suitable marriage partner, and partly to experiment with other relationships.

"College propels them into a larger pool that is mostly white, and the women find that the white men open something more artistic in them," he says. "It removes them from the basic level of survival, getting a job and a degree. They're in college to explore, and these white guys are more nurturing of that. Unlike the Asian guys, who are more focused on careers and getting ahead, a white guy seems like the ultimate freedom. The women think that white culture can tolerate infidelities, sharing of responsibilities, career indecision. It seems a million times more elastic."

While Asian families may feel ambivalent about having non-Asian sons-in-law, there are certain mixes that are socially accepted, even desired. An Asian family will often welcome a white man. "It's about being accepted into a larger power structure," Menon continues. "All immigrants want to jump to being fully functioning in America. Marrying someone white is a ticket to that."

INTER-ETHNIC WARFARE

Not all mixed relationships are so easily accepted, however. For some nonwhite Americans, dating other nonwhites from different groups is the real taboo. I heard many dramatic stories of opposition when it came to crossing from one ethnic group to another.

Ted is a Filipino man in his 30s who grew up in the United States and spent some of his high school years in the Philippines. Shuttling between worlds, he never felt any stigma or sense of difference in either. When he began dating a Chinese-Filipina woman, however, he encountered a blockade of prejudice for the first time. Not only did the woman's family oppose her choice, they kept on trying to set her up with a more suitable Chinese suitor. Ted, who hoped to attend the wedding of his girlfriend's brother and to finally meet her family in person, was rebuffed and told not to come. "What upsets me is they don't know me at all. But my girlfriend is very close to them, and she's going to have to make a decision. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not marrying her family."

Menon also encountered his share of opposition when he dated Katie, whose family emigrated from Taiwan when she was eight. Katie's mother refused to acknowledge that her daughter had an Indian boyfriend, so Katie never brought it up. When Menon and Katie moved in together, Katie was so intent on concealing the relationship from her mother that Menon's voice wasn't on the answering machine and only Katie picked up the phone. For Katie's mother, a single immigrant who runs a hair salon in San Francisco's Chinatown, saving face in the community was what mattered most. "Her daughter's choice reflected on her ability to be a good mother," Menon explains. "The Chinese community is fairly close-knit. The immigration from Taiwan didn't broaden her idea of who would be suitable for her daughter."

Lisa, a poet and professor who is Chinese-American and married to an Afro-Latino man, says, "My family was very supportive of my choice. But I did get the sense from my extended family and also from talking to other Asian aunties and uncles that if you do date outside your race, it should be Caucasian. If you date an African-American or Latino, that's considered dirty laundry."

THE BLACK LINE

Despite the huge strides in civil rights that have taken place in the United States, the black color line still remains one of our toughest barriers. Lorraine Rice, who was raised by a black single mother in a largely white suburb, socialized easily with her classmates. But when she wound up at Hampshire College, a small, liberal arts institution in Massachusetts with only a handful of minority students, she began to feel her racial isolation keenly. "The students of color were in such small numbers, and most of us were there on scholarship," she recalls. "We all stuck together."

In college, Lorraine plunged into studying the politics of race and student activism. Ironically, the summer she taught a course on racism she fell in love with Joe, an old high school friend. He was crazy about her, treated her well, and excited her intellect and her emotions. The only problem: He was white.

"It was a really intense time," she says. "We spent half of that first year fighting, half of it falling in love. At one point we were sitting in the car, and he got really quiet and said he realized there was no way we could stay together because he didn't think that I could accept a white man."

Moved by her boyfriend's struggle to understand her perspective, Lorraine softened, thinking that for the first time in her life, maybe a white person really could empathize with her.

The couple eventually moved to Brooklyn, New York, where for the first time in her life, Lorraine lived in a predominately black neighborhood. She found being in the majority a "wonderful experience," but she adds, "We get looks. When we're walking together, a black guy will shake his head at me and I feel ashamed. I have a very different reaction when we go where people are white. In those situations I become stronger. I'll stand up a little straighter, or grab his hands. I like to put it in their faces, as if to show them that a black woman and white man can love each other." Lorraine admits, though, that she's still conflicted about her relationship to the African-American community. "On some level I feel like I'm letting "us" down. For instance, when I meet a black woman, I don't make a point of telling her that I have a white husband. Instead I avoid the subject. It's some kind of insecurity. With white people I'm asserting something."

Lorraine's feelings have been influenced in part by the reaction of Joe's family. When the two decided to get married, his immediate family was thrilled, but his other relatives were quite open in their displeasure. "The first time I met his grandparents, his great-grandmother left the house crying. Even now, I'm putting together our wedding pictures and know that if I send them copies, his grandparents won't display them."

To Lorraine, who studied racial theory extensively in college, it's hard to separate personal choices about race from the larger political dimensions. To this day, she says, "Whenever I see a person of color and a white person, I become a little critical. I'm wondering, "Has this person done their homework? Do they know about white privilege? Are they aware of their own internalized prejudices? What's going on with the woman of color-is she looking for white validation?"

She adds with a laugh, "I think that race is really important in this country. But the reality is I'm madly in love with my husband."

On the other side of that racial equation is Erica, a young white woman who is about to graduate from Columbia University and who, based on her own experiences, became so absorbed in the topic of interracial relationships that she wrote her senior thesis on it.

"There's a popular image of a black male athlete dating a white woman because she's supposedly a trophy," she says. "But in my experience it's exactly the opposite. As a white woman who has been involved with black men, I have never felt like a trophy. I've had to take a lot of flak."

That flak, she says, comes from all sides. When she and a black boyfriend walk down a street in a mostly black neighborhood, they're often heckled and cursed; women will shout out to her partner, "Leave that white girl alone." In white neighborhoods, they're given odd looks. And the worst reactions come from friends - his friends, who make outright comments, claiming he's selling out by dating white. And her friends, who whisper behind her back. "People would say, 'Oh, your parents must be so mortified.' My parents don't care at all; they aren't like that. But it's other people's way of saying they wouldn't do it - they wouldn't date someone black. The assumption is that you're dating down."

When Lisa, who is white, decided to marry her black husband, she discovered her colleagues openly expressing similar prejudices. "One patronizingly asked me, 'Are you sure this is what you want to do?' The subtext was, 'Are you sure you want to have a serious relationship with a black man?' This disappointed me. These comments came particularly from the older generation."

Erica says these attitudes cross generations and persist in young people too. Her first serious boyfriend in high school was black, she says, and, "I don't think he was prepared to take the flak. It was one of the reasons we didn't work. We couldn't be totally in a full-fledged relationship. He didn't want me to hang out with his friends."

Though Erica eventually dated someone in college who was better able to deal with these pressures, it wasn't easy to bridge their worlds - her boyfriend, who came from an urban black neighborhood, had a hard time connecting to her more privileged white friends. At the same time, she was keenly aware of a double standard among his friends. "Every black man that I know has messed around, dated a white woman," she says bluntly. "Not many will bring her home to meet their parents. To them it's a shameful thing."

SETTLING DOWN

For many of us, our 20s are a time of experimentation, of testing the borders of identity. Andrea, the Chinese-American writer, recalls a period of dating that she dubs her "international" phase, when she tried out every possible ethnicity and race, almost as a way of expressing her own confusion. "I think I was trying to figure it all out."

When it comes time to settle down, though, many people suddenly look for a mate from the same background. I've known many South Asian men, for instance, who, when they hit marriage age, drop their American girlfriends and start wooing the kind of women their parents have been pushing on them all along.

"The dating field is wide open," says Menon. "Marriage and joining of families, however, is very determined by skin colors and ethnicity."

Many say it's a question of comfort - when you consider building a life with someone, you may want to share a similar cultural background with him or her. But I wonder if there's not something else: a deeper, more primal response to mating. We might tolerate mixture and difference in the media, but perhaps we are, deep down, racial narcissists who secretly feel that our group is somehow superior to others. For some minorities, there's the additional lurking fear of being "bleached out" by white America.

I must admit this fear has cropped up for me, now that I'm married to a Jewish man and expecting our first child. I'm very proud of both my mother's family history and the Indian side of my background. But I find myself comparing my husband's skin and mine, glad that he is olive-skinned and dark-haired (during the summer we are competitive about who tans more quickly); relishing the story of his German-Jewish aunt who is so dark that she lived openly in Amsterdam during World War II under an assumed identity as an Indonesian nanny. Sometimes I feel as if I am trying to make my husband a few shades darker, to bring him over to my side, because my side, I feel, is special.

Andrea also confesses that even though she believes love and compatibility are what's most important in a relationship, she sometimes has panicky feelings about whether her future offspring will be divorced from her Chinese background. While she grew up in a small, mostly white town in the Midwest, and her current boyfriend is white, she comments, "I have this primal response to Asian children. And I have this anxiety about how I would feel if I don't have children who look like me. There must be something very deep-seated about that."

Even so, more and more people are crossing over. And many of their stories are happy ones.

Nadine Landsvetter, an African-American ESL teacher, met her husband, who is German, while they were both teaching overseas, in Thailand. They now have two children, and she has begun an organization for families with biracial children: What Are You, or w.a.y. "Our families have been wonderful," she says. "Mine has already been exposed to interracialism since my older sister married a Jewish man. Martin's family welcomed me with open arms. We occasionally get a disapproving look. But this is my partner in life. I can either go with the flow or get a divorce. That's all there is to it."

Some of the myths about "losing one's identity" in mixed-race marriages appear to be dissolving. Says Lisa, "The assumption is that when you marry someone of another race you have to decide which tradition you're going to follow. For the majority of people it's very different. These identities might actually become more accentuated. You have this constant challenge, and it can raise your consciousness of who you are."

THE FUTURE

Ever since Spencer Tracy finally gave Sidney Poitier the OK, the clarion call has been heard. Demographics and attitudes have changed. At press time, Alabama, the last state with antimiscegenation laws, is poised to strike them from the books. Thanks to those marches that we all believed in, middle-class black families are often the ones making sure their kids go to the best schools, and immigrants from all over the world are irrevocably altering the complexion of once-white suburbs. The Hispanic population, which doesn't easily fit into our racial categories, will soon become the largest minority group in America. In Lisa's case, for instance, the "black line" doesn't even make sense. Her husband grew up in the Caribbean, where racial mixing was an accepted part of his background. "It's a North American paradigm to think in these terms," she says. "We still don't have the linguistic tools to talk about the multiracial experience."

As for me, I often wonder if we're too hyper-aware of race, if we've lost some of the optimistic spirit behind integration. As a book author, I visit college campuses to give lectures and am amazed at the plethora of student organizations based on race and ethnicity. Race is everywhere, it seems. Recently, at Harvard, I asked a group of South Asian students if they thought of themselves as South Asian when they were growing up. "I became South Asian when I got to college," one young woman admitted. Separatist politics, the rise of ethnic studies, means young people like her are emerging in an atmosphere that is ever more racially and ethnically aware. Their history is multiculturalism, which sometimes heightens differences; ours was civil rights, where the goal was to assimilate into a broader culture.

Nadine expressed it best: "If you keep walking around, looking for disapproval, snide remarks, fights, you'll get them. You make your environment and it responds to you. If you're swayed by what people think and do, then stick to monoracial, same race same culture relationships. But bear in mind, when there is true love, it is blind."

MARINA BUDHOS IS THE AUTHOR OF "REMIX: CONVERSATIONS WITH IMMIGRANT TEENAGERS" AND THE NOVELS "HOUSE OF WAITING" AND "THE PROFRESSOR OF LIGHT" (HOLT). HER WORK HAS APPEARED IN TRAVEL & LEISURE, THE NATION, AND ELSEWHERE.