Yvonne McIntyre intimately understands the pitfalls of an interracial marriage.

As a lobbyist for Kansas City Power and Light in Washington, D.C., McIntyre - whose father Ronald is black and whose mother Amalia is Chinese and Guatemalan - sometimes has to hide the fact that she has a white husband.

Congressional Black Caucus functions are the worst, she says, especially when she brings her husband Patrick Grobbel.

"I tell my husband to act like he doesn't know me or to stand behind me," said McIntyre, 33. "If I'm lobbying a black congressman and he finds out I have a white husband, it's a problem."

Ingrained prejudice still remains in many areas of society, but the principle of equality is taking hold. For Yvonne McIntyre and her siblings, who were raised during the Seventies, the color-line distinctions that surrounded their parents and grandparents are becoming fuzzy.

The blurring of the color line is evident at the fourth interracial marriage in Yvonne's immediate family, a September wedding between her youngest brother Carlos McIntyre and Tiffany Bobek, a white woman of Eastern European descent.

Her brother Norman married a white woman of Swedish descent and sister Maritza married a white man born in France. Another sister, Dr. Carmen McIntyre, is single.

Demographers might describe this branch of the McIntyre family as ahead of the curve on the what some experts call the browning of America in the upcoming millennium.

But in the bridal dressing room at the Detroit Edison Boat Club, Tiffany wasn't worried about population trends.

She pirouetted in an ivory gown, adjusted her veil over reddish bobbed hair and reapplied her lipstick.

"Race is a complete non-issue in my eyes," said the 23-year-old who grew up in what she describes as a "red-neck" community outside of Armada. "It's not how it used to be when people were Irish-American or Polish-American. Everyone is everything.

"It's good when people have an identity, but it's better when you have a lot you can identify with. " Moments before he changed out of shorts and a T-shirt into his tuxedo, Carlos echoed his bride's sentiments.

"I can remember a black woman coming up to me in the laundry room in Hamlin Hall at Oakland University," he said, recalling his college days where he met Tiffany. "She asked me, 'What are you?' and 'Who do you date?' I told her I date people I have something in common with. I grew up in a multi-cultural family with parents who raised us to be open-minded.

"When I starting getting serious about Tiffany, color seemed less important than the fact she had a shaved head and I had blue, green and orange (dyed) hair."

As if to de-emphasize ethnic roots, the couple picked out an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem that included the line, "the face of all the world has changed," as the first reading at their outdoor wedding on the banks of the Detroit River. The Rev. Thomas W. Anthony closed the non-denominational service with the Apache wedding prayer.

"Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter to the other," he intoned.

Then, looking out over the backdrop of blue sky, sailboats and an international boundary, he quipped, "There's no boat ride on this river to compare to what you have before you."

The couple - he is a 26-year-old psychiatric social worker who grew up in Detroit and she sells Liz Claiborne clothing - embraced as a passing boat saluted with a loud blast of its horn. The guests blew bubbles and cheered.

The groom's grandmother, Cheaber Farmer, leaned against her cane, looked on approvingly and said, "Welcome to a United Nations family."

Still, there was the faintest hint of uneasiness among some wedding-goers over what might lie ahead for the newlyweds. Ronald McIntyre, the groom's father, voiced his worries the week before during a family reunion at Kensington Park.

Sitting at a picnic table surrounded by relatives who could trace their roots to slaves, a slaveholder and even American Indians, McIntyre said there were some "murmurings" among family about yet another interracial marriage in the clan.

Some of the fears centered around diluting their black identity, now a point of hard-won pride.

McIntyre recalled the words of Mama Sarah Allen, his great-grandmother who migrated to Detroit from the South in the early part of the century. Her philosophy reflected a sense of resignation over labels applied by the white culture.

"She said, 'if you are assigned the role of being black in this country, that's what you are,'" he mused. "But it's changing with my children. My sons labeled themselves black, but they didn't feel black. It's a complicated thing. I think about my grandchildren. Hopefully, they won't be stigmatized."

Back at the wedding reception, Ingrid McIntyre, Norman's wife who is pregnant with their first child, says she can't predict the future or what her child will encounter, but she is testy over the seemingly endless questions she gets about race.

"The Catholic priest at Gesu Church who married us asked, 'Will race be an issue?'" she said. "It's a good question, but it hasn't been an issue. And in some ways, I don't even think the question, 'What race are you?' is a valid question. It's not valid to ask that on a census. Because why is it a mixed race if you are Mexican and white, but not Swedish and German?

McIntyre, a social worker like her husband, doesn't even like to think of America in the classic terms of the melting pot.

She prefers the image of the salad bowl, she said.

"The identities don't get blended," Ingrid explained. "A tomato doesn't stop being a tomato."

As the lights dimmed in the reception hall and Tiffany swept along the dance floor in the arms of her husband and then father-in-law, Mother Cheaber's constant refrain in the months leading up to the wedding seemed most appropriate.

"We are all connected," she said. As the millennium approached and the wedding music played on, her words seemed prophetic.