By TaRessa Stovall

On New Year’s Day, as much of America was still enjoying the exhilaration of Barack Obama’s victorious presidential campaign and anticipating the Inauguration festivities, young black men were still being murdered – by police officers and by each other.

While he wasn’t the only victim in the first days of 2009, Oscar Grant, a 24-year-old father who had been pleading with his friends to calm down and cooperate with police who had handcuffed them, was pushed to the ground and shot in the back, at point-blank range by Johannes Mehserle, a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer. Mehserle  allegedly said he thought he was pointing a taser, rather than a loaded gun, at Grant’s back.

According to the article, “Justice for Oscar Grant,” posted on thenation.com on January 14, “Grant found himself at the Fruitvale BART station after he was pulled off the train along with three other young men who were being detained as BART officers searched for suspects in a fight that started at the West Oakland BART station. In front of hundreds of BART passengers who were halted from reaching their destinations, the unarmed Grant was told to lay on the BART platform with his hands behind his back. Officer Meherle then pulled out his gun, stood over Grant and shot him in the back …  the bullet ricocheted and lodged in his lung.

“Following the shooting, according to a … report in Alternet, BART police tried to confiscate all the videos taken by witnesses. They failed and three clips of videos made it to YouTube, where they were viewed hundreds of thousands of times and eventually picked up and played by the news media, bringing the story national attention.”

Grassroots groups quickly formed, including The Coalition Against Police Executions (CAPE) on Facebook, and The Gathering for Justice, an intergeneration civil rights organization founded by Harry Belafonte (www.thegatheringforjustice.org.)

All murders are tragic and all police attacks and slaughters on innocent people are tragically unjust. The rise of Obama and the slaughter of Oscar Grant are two sides of the complex and multi-faceted coin that is race in America. Had our new President been a young man traveling on BART that day with his friends, he could have easily become the late Oscar Grant.

Too easily. It is that gap, yawning more widely than the Grand Canyon, that we Americans must begin to bridge before true and lasting progress is anything but a lopsided fantasy. Those who keep yammering about a “post-racial America” seem to wish that racial differences, racial disparities and all the tough and painful truths of racism are just going to magically disappear. We are starving for our sugar-coated Disney ending, strung out on the notion that wanting it will make it so.

Sorry, folks. We have work to do. We have lives to save. President Obama has repeatedly emphasized that we are responsible for change, by being change, by working for change, by demonstrating something higher, better and more powerful than we have demonstrated in the past.

When the travesties of justice are no longer viewed as sad but unremarkable business-as-usual; when black men, women, children and elders are no longer treated as inherently bad, criminal, inferior and problematic by “law enforcement” officers; and when we can come down off of the fairy-dust high of “post-racial America” hallucinations to start working toward some real respect and fairness at every level, then we can leverage the hope that made history into change that is truly worth celebrating.

Oscar Grant and the other young black men killed on that day, in that week, at any time, could have been Barack Obama’s sons. In fact, in a profoundly symbolic way, they are his sons, and ours as well. It is not until their lives become a priority, part of the national agenda of Things That Matter,  that we can move from promise to progress, from the “audacity of hope” to the reality of equality, and claim a victory that is not tainted by tragic injustice and a national sense of shame.

• Overview of murders of young black men
• Video of police officer shooting Oscar Grant (Warning: explicit)
• Learn how you can help make a difference

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.