What's interracial dating like today? Though mixed-race romance is more common, some couples still face ugly reactions. Cosmo takes a look.(WHAT YOU'RE DYING TO KNOW ABOUT)

* When Kevin Hill cutie Taye Diggs and his Broadway-star wife, Idina Menzel, received death threats last year that mentioned their biracial marriage, it served as an unpleasant reminder that mixed-race couples are still confronted by prejudice--sometimes in aggressive forms. "Interracial romance is an eroding taboo, but it's not like we're now living in some racial nirvana," says Renee Romano, PhD, professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University and author of Race Mixing.

The U.S. Census Bureau identifies four races: blacks, whites, Asians, and Native Americans. Intermarriages between all groups are on the rise, but the pairing that seems to push the most hot buttons is black/white. "Many Americans are still threatened when they see blacks and whites in love," says Debbie Magids, PhD, a New York psychologist who has counseled biracial couples. "Forty years ago, most people chose partners from the same race, so the idea that racial background shouldn't matter is still a relatively new, hard-to-accept concept for some people."

Black-and-White Reception

That's a lesson Karen Kildare, a black university recruiting director in Lincoln, Nebraska, learned firsthand when she brought home her college boyfriend, a white guy from an Iowa farming family. "My dad said he was worried I'd become the family's servant," she says. "He had this ridiculous mental picture of his baby girl out working in a field for a bunch of white folks. Meanwhile, even female friends were calling me a whitey lover, a wannabe."

Heather Ambrogio, a white woman from Bayonne, New Jersey, whose fiance is black, deals with public censure on a regular basis. "One time, we were at the mall and two young black women yelled at my man: "You're a sellout!'" she says. "But the worst was when we were apartment hunting. We called one owner to say we were on our way. When she opened the door, she took one look at us and said 'It's been rented."'

Why the lingering resentment of color-blind love? Experts say white opponents may not realize it, but their disapproval could be rooted in pre--Civil War attitudes about white purity. "The idea of white purity rose out of the need of whites to see African Americans as inferior in order to justify slavery," says George Yancey, PhD, a black sociology professor at the University of North Texas, who, with his white wife, coauthored Just Don't Marry One: Interracial Dating, Marriage, and Parenting.

Yancey says the notion stayed with us after the war, when it was used to legitimize segregation, discriminatory separate-but-equal laws, and legal bans on mixed-race marriages. (Prior to 1967, when the Supreme Court decided that prohibiting interracial unions was unconstitutional, mixed-race couples could be and occasionally were--arrested in some states. White women who dated black men were especially stigmatized; many of them were fired from ...