By TaRessa Stovall:

Like many others, I was intoxicated by the magical moment when the election of Barack Obama was announced. The first coherent thought that emerged from the joyous whirlwind of my mind was: What does my son, Calvin, think of this? What is he feeling? What will this mean for his future?

And then: Dear God, please let it make the difference that so urgently needs to be made.

I write this as a sequel to my first column, written for and about my son for USA Weekend Magazine in the pre-Internet days of 1991. I was newly-married, halfway through my first pregnancy and trying to reconcile the nonstop television broadcasts of Rodney King’s beating by the Los Angeles Police Department with the knowledge that I was growing a black boy.

In the decade that followed, as Calvin learned to walk, talk, read, write, play sports and become a big brother to his baby sister, Mariah, those LA cops were acquitted, sparking one of the worst riots in U.S. history. In 1997, Amadou Diallo was shot to death by undercover officers; they, too, were acquitted. In 1998, Danny Reyes was one of four young men pulled over by New Jersey state troopers on their way to basketball camp in North Carolina. The cops shot all of the men; all charges were thrown out, and our new home state of New Jersey became the nation’s capital of racial profiling. In 2001, Timothy Thomas, an unarmed 19-year-old, became the 15th African American killed by Cincinnati, Ohio police in a five-year period.

Just two years ago, as Calvin began towering over me and learning to drive, New York police officers fired more than 50 bullets into the car driven by Sean Bell, an innocent and everyday man, killing him and wounding three others as they left Bell’s bachelor party.

This tragic litany has been repeated countless times around our country, with black men of all ages equally in danger from the public servants paid to allegedly protect them as from the fratricide born of what Dr. Joy Leary calls Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome.

Today, Calvin is a high school senior, an aspiring journalist with a strong sense of self and hopes of attending a top college. He has good grades, strong standardized test scores, a decent resume and a heart full of dreams yearning to be fulfilled. Not surprisingly, his favorite book is Nathan McCall’s brilliant coming-of-age memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, which details McCall’s journey from a troubled youth to journalistic acclaim.

Calvin is no different from his friends or millions of his demographic peers: young, gifted, black and looking ahead. He is in the category of those who have the audacity to stare down the odds and still believe that they can make it, despite the abundance of media coverage, educational reports and research studies to the contrary.

As I vowed during my pregnancy, I have done my best to vaccinate Calvin with a healthy sense of identity, positive expectations and exposure to high-achieving African Americans in all professions. Guided by research suggesting that it takes five to seven caring adults (in addition to parents) to steer a young African-American boy or girl safely to adulthood today, I strong-armed Calvin into taking part in rites-of-passage, mentoring and college preparation programs offered in our community. He has continued on his own, and taken the initiative to become involved in several leadership programs as well.

I am, knock wood, deeply grateful for all of this, and confident that Calvin will grow into a strong, successful man able to fulfill his version of the American Dream.

Still, we live in the State of Emergency familiar to anyone involved in growing a young black male to manhood in America. This state, a perpetual Code Red that forces us into nonstop hyper-alertness, is grounded both in the history of African-American survival in the United States and the oft-repeated fact that a young black man is more likely to die before birth, in the first year of life or before adulthood than anyone else in the developed world.

While stereotypes suggest that it is only those young black men who are desperately poor, living in urban-jungle settings attending substandard, bullet-ridden schools and/or involved with gangs who qualify for the “Endangered Species” label, there is abundant research to prove that no one is fully immune.

According to what feels like a never-ending tsunami of studies, surveys and news stories during my son’s lifetime, all young black men in America are at risk of being damaged or destroyed by nearly every danger you can name. A simple Google search calls up countless articles, statistics, books and opinions on the topic. You’ve seen them, with such titles as: “The Search for Thugs: Young Black Men are Stigmatized as Gangstas, Asking for Trouble,” from Newsweek; “Invisible Men: Many Young Black Males are in Crisis,” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; “Young Black Males Headed for Extinction?” from The Washington Post; and The Trouble with Black Boys: The Role and Influence of Environmental and Cultural Factors on the Academic Performance of African American Males, and Other Reflections on Race, Equity and the Future of Public Education, the latest book from education expert Pedro Noguera of Harvard University.

I don’t need to cite these dire statistics or quote the dour predictions here; they are such a staple of news reporting that they fail to shock anymore. The question is, do those constant references to “minority achievement gaps,” “growing incarceration rates,” “Black-on-Black violence,” “alarming health disparities” and “hip hop gangstas,” help to hem in the dreams and aspirations of many black boys. Do they convey the message that “It’s no use dreaming, because you aren’t going to make it,” which some kids take to heart?

It doesn’t take an expert to see that few in our nation are willing to lay odds in favor of Calvin and his peers.

Of course, some said Obama had little chance of becoming the Democratic nominee, let alone President (-Elect) of the United States. Set against the backdrop of the crises facing young black men, what does his election mean for my son and his peers? Perhaps it means that the American Dream is finally a bit more within reach for his demographic.  Perhaps it means that black males might be seen as something other than problematic, menacing and doomed. Perhaps it demonstrates that one can come from beginnings that are “non-traditional” by every measure of mainstream American standards, and make it to the very top.

While it is too soon to know what the Obama presidency means in this context, I am mighty thankful for this gift, praying hard that it signals a turnaround in the public perception of the worth and promise of my son and those like him. And in how our young men view themselves.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not so drunk on historic significance that I believe America will make a radical about-face anytime soon. But I am willing to invest some faith in Obama as a symbol of better things to come and a powerful role model for our young men. His down-to-earth intelligence, his appealing good-guy cool, his struggles and the way he commands and shows respect are, for me, a refreshing antidote to the endless parade of bad news and buffoonish black public figures given high visibility in the media who seem more invested in making fools of themselves and perpetuating damaging stereotypes than showcasing their intelligence, dignity or pride.

When it comes to young black men, Obama – who straddles generations as smoothly as he does cultures – gets it. In a pre-election interview on MTV, he explained that “passing a law about people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, getting health care, dealing with the war in Iraq. Any public official who is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there.

“Having said that, brothers should pull up your pants. You’re walking by your mother, your grandmother, and your underwear is showing … Come on. There are some issues that we fact that you don’t have to pass a law [against], but that doesn’t mean folks can’t have some sense and some respect for other people.”

As a mother, I know that Obama, who wrote of experimenting with marijuana and cocaine in his struggles to find his identity as a young black/biracial man, might be wearing saggin’ pants if he were a teen today. This symbol of youthful rebellion might provide him an easy way to fit in with and be accepted by his peers. My son knows that as well, which is why our new leader seems to be as appealing and credible to young black men as he is to those of us who are guiding them.

When I look at Obama, I see hints of Calvin, his friends and all of our young men, even those with saggin’ pants, too many tattoos, mouthfuls of bling and souls beaten down by the dynamics of the system.

I hope these same young men recognize their own promise and potential reflected in our new president; their rich possibilities reflected in his victorious journey. While Obama has done a masterful job of representing not just all Americans, but the world, his success belongs to our young black men in a very special way. He was once them, and they now have a new, more powerful kind of example of what they can become. For it is they who will walk the trail he is blazing, heads held high, eyes locked on the prize, stomping on those damning odds every step of the way.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline