The nastiest version of the myth, however, holds that while those black men believe they're marrying up, they're actually marrying down, almost always choosing white women who are lower class, less well educated -- and unattractive to boot. On that issue the best pop-culture primer remains Spike Lee's iconic "Jungle Fever." Although in interviews Lee has complained about the plague of black men dating "ugly" white women, not just lower-class ones, he cast the gorgeous Annabelle Sciorra as Wesley Snipes' white girlfriend. That's because ugly might make for a useful, stigmatizing racial myth, but it's bad box office, and Spike ain't about socialist realism, anyway. Still, Sciorra's sexy Angie was a working class Italian with a high school education, while Snipes' Flipper Purify -- Purify -- get it? -- and his lovely black wife had graduate degrees. Of course nature intended for Flipper and his wife to wind up back together -- class tells -- and so they do.

Maybe the most radical thing Kennedy does, albeit briefly, is suggest the possibility that the conventional anti-mixing wisdom about successful black men -- they get some money, then they marry white -- sometimes works the other way: Some black men (and black women) may choose white partners, then become successful. And not because they face less racism (in fact they may face more, given lingering prejudice from blacks and whites), but because of the social capital and wider world of connections they acquire with that merger -- and maybe even because of psychological traits that leave them open to finding a white partner.

The paucity of research on these questions is amazing. I saw one intriguing study of 1990 census data showing that in upper-income American marriages (over $100,000), as well as marriages in which both partners have postdoctoral educations, there are almost as many black-white couples as there are couples in which both partners are black -- even though black-white marriages make up only 12 percent of black marriages overall. No one has really looked at what this means. It might simply mean that affluent whites are raising the income level of their black spouses; it might mean successful black men -- and now women -- wind up marrying whites; it might mean racism and other bars to success faced by blacks are reduced if they take a white spouse. But it might also mean that men and women inclined to marry outside their race have other traits -- curiosity? courage? self-confidence? -- that make them materially successful.

We really don't know. But Kennedy approvingly quotes Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson's bold pro-integrationist theory that intermixing is a good thing, especially for blacks, because it widens their networks and increases their social capital, as well as that of their offspring. You can see why that's offensive to some African-Americans, who ask: Can't we increase the cultural, social and economic capital of black families? Can't we lower the barriers of racism, so black people who fall in love with other black people have the same advantages as those who love whites?

But social progress may not work that way. Those who are willing to venture out into new worlds and explore frontiers are often rewarded for their courage. And marriage has always been an economic arrangement, in which partners choose one another, and give one another advantages, in ways that have nothing to do with love, even if they only cop to the fairy tale version of coupling.

I think Kennedy overstates the roles that sexual fear and projection, and the threat of racial "mongrelization," have played as the motivation behind racially discriminatory laws. Maintaining economic privilege for whites has always been more important. From slavery to the New York City draft riots to Reconstruction, up through the opposition to welfare, busing and affirmative action that emerged in the 1960s and persists today, the desire to maintain white advantage -- or in the working class, the desire not to face more disadvantage, thanks to competition from another pool of exploitable workers -- has been the force driving most racist laws, and the racial prejudice that survived those laws' repeal. That's why it makes sense that today, the most (publicly) acceptable black critique of intermarriage centers on the fear that the trend will hurt the black community economically, that it's causing an exodus of good black husbands who, choosing white wives, flee to the promised land of integration -- which means whiteness.

When those arguments fail, of course, opponents resort to sexual stereotyping and stigmatizing, name-calling and contempt. But it didn't work for white opponents of intermarriage, and it won't work for their black counterparts. It's wrong, it's racist -- and the drive to mix is just too strong. My advice to women like Edwards who are trying to revive the taboo against interracial dating is simple: Remember Sexuality 101, in which taboo heightens attraction. And I'd also suggest a lesson plan for Sociology 2003: Defining a community by the threats to it is not an appealing vision of community.

As an outsider who's been intimate in the world of blacks and Jews, I can certainly testify from experience that neither approach is working. Of course, Judaism is a religion, not a race (at least the way most people understand the concept), and so it's been possible for some people who worry about Jews intermarrying themselves out of existence to come up with a compromise approach, involving outreach to non-Jewish spouses based on the appeal of Judaism -- its spiritual and cultural traditions of wisdom, justice and comfort in the face of suffering and loss -- rather than just guilt about high rates of Jewish intermarriage. But there's really no comparable black compromise with intermarriage, at least for those with views like Edwards'. An old friend and mentor of mine who worked on black poverty issues used to tell me, "Black is a state of mind," and he welcomed white co-workers, as well as the white girlfriends or husbands of black friends who shared his values, into his vision of community. That's not possible for racial essentialists, who define community by color.

By the end of Kennedy's book, though, unexpectedly I felt a flash of sympathy for Edwards. Because if you insist that no one should ostracize blacks and whites who love one another, you have to have some human sympathy for black women who love black men, and are genuinely pained at the shortage of them. Stanley Crouch's wildly pro-miscegenation novel "Don't the moon look lonesome" actually captured it well, when the tough, screwed-up Cecilia explains why she can't get over wanting a black man -- a man who is the color of the men in her family, the color of childhood, the color of tenderness and love. "All I want in the world is one of those kinds of men I saw what I was just a little kid," Cecilia says. If the heart has its reasons, hers does too. None of us can be blamed for whom we love.

That said, we can't preach racial separatism for one group, and not for everybody. Although the current clamor to revive taboos against interracial dating lacks the force of law -- one thing white supremacists used to have on their side that black mothers like Edwards clearly don't -- it's still the wrong message for a multiracial democracy. And clearly most people understand that. There's no doubt all this is easier for the younger generation. Edwards is in her 50s, Kennedy and I are in our 40s; Essence's target audience seems to reach from our age down into the 30s. In the pages of Africana.com, and other sites that seem more geared toward younger black people, there's a little less angst and a lot more acceptance, by women as well as men.

Still, interracial love can't by itself eradicate racism, and Kennedy admits that. He makes the obligatory nod to Brazil, ground zero of miscegenation, in which everyone mixes and yet somehow, the elite remains white and the underclass is black. But it's too pessimistic to say the U.S. is headed for the same fate -- there's less racial mixing here, but there's more social mobility between classes. Intermarriage could lead to greater social equity here than it has in Brazil. We don't know where this experiment will wind up. But one thing is clear: Interracial intimacy alone won't eliminate racism, but efforts to stigmatize it don't move us forward, and almost certainly set us back. The comfort in reading Kennedy's book lies in its clarity that just like their doomed white forebears, today's opponents of race mixing can't win.

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