What's that conversation every father dreads as your son approaches those dangerous teenage years? Sex? No. How to deal with the cops. I've never been pulled over while driving in a ''nice'' neighborhood; my son was stopped a block from our apartment in Manhattan and asked by the patrolman what he was doing in ''this neighborhood.'' I feared for my son's safety, not in the depth of the hood, but on the ritzier streets of the Big Apple.

As a white man with a foot, maybe a toe, in a black world I began listening with a third ear once my son Drew was born 38 years ago. Those insidious racial asides that somehow I never heard before now resonated.

On the night we met, at a convention in New Orleans, my future wife and I were walking down the street and a local redneck, pretty drunk, started baiting me with racial slurs. I beckoned him closer, started measuring the distance between my toe and his testicles as two very large members of the New Orleans constabulary grabbed him and tossed him into a squad car. As I shared with our son years later, turn the other cheek, up to a point. Sometimes you just gotta teach a lesson.

Forty years ago, when Joan and I married, I crossed an invisible barrier, from that white world where you occasionally have a black co-worker to a world of people of color.

My late wife was one of a handful of black women at an elite Eastern university. She had studied Latin and Greek at wonderful public high school, yet she had to face ignorance term after term. Her saber-like tongue may not have been appreciated by her classmates, but she firmly believed stupidity had to be challenged, a lesson my son Drew learned all too well.

As a black, male athlete, my son often encountered classmates who assumed that he was only in college due to a sports scholarship, and, if he was from Manhattan, that meant Harlem. In the tradition of his mother, he enjoys skewing the fool. Recently, he proudly attended his wife's induction ceremony into Phi Beta Kappa. A college official asked who he was, Drew pointed to his wife, Sommer, and said, ''I'm the husband of your valedictorian.'' The official blurted, ''Oh, I thought you'd be white.'' (His wife is black.) Drew shot back, ''Does that mean you're not going to induct her?'' He's got a sadistic streak. He enjoyed watching her stutter.