Here is a picture of busy traffic, aren't cars so horrible.

That speech came at a time of political crisis. The Zimmerman acquittal was a different kind of crisis. There had been demonstrations, and President Obama could not afford to have them grow into riots.

It must be hard for young black males to always be viewed as criminals by people who notice crime statistics. We've jawboned that sad story for 40 years. Last week, President Obama ran it around the block again in another speech about himself in reaction to the George Zimmerman verdict.

Let's give that beloved chestnut a rest for a day and consider another way blacks have it harder than whites. Only black people are expected to never speak against their community. Might we spend five minutes admiring the courage of blacks who step forward and tell the truth to cops, juries and reporters in the middle of our periodic racial Armageddons? This one is never discussed at all.

In December 1984, Bernie Goetz shot four black men who were trying to mug him on the New York City subway. (About a year later, one youth admitted that, yes, in fact, they "were goin' to rob him." They thought he looked like "easy bait.")

A few days after the shooting, The New York Times got the racism ball rolling with its "beneath the surface" reporting technique: "Just beneath the surface of last week's debate was the question of whether the shooting may have been racially motivated."

Hoping for support for its below-the-surface thesis, the Times visited the mother of Darrell Cabey, the young man paralyzed from the shooting. As the Times summarized the feeling at the Claremont housing project where Cabey lived, "many people said the four teen-agers were troublemakers and probably got what they deserved."

Cabey's mother had received one letter that said: "[Y]ou get no sympathy from us peace-loving, law-abiding blacks. We will even contribute to support the guy who taught you a lesson, every way we can ... P.S. I hope your wheelchair has a flat tire."

The Washington Post also interviewed Cabey's neighbors. Eighteen-year-old Yvette Green said: "If I'd had a gun, I would have shot him." Darryl Singleton, 24 years old, called Cabey, "a sweet person," but added, "if I had a gun, I would have shot the guy."


As white liberals (and Al Sharpton) screamed "racism!" how'd you like to be the black woman called by the defense at Goetz's trial? Andrea Reid, who was on the subway car during the shooting, testified: Those "punks were bothering the white man ... those punks got what they deserved."

Reid had met the mother and brother of one of Goetz's muggers at a party. But she took the stand and told the truth.

Juror Robert Leach, a black bus driver from Harlem, was one of Goetz's most vehement defenders in the jury room, even persuading the others not to convict Goetz for unlawful possession of any guns, other than the one he used in the shooting. In the end, three blacks and one Hispanic on the jury voted to acquit Goetz of all 13 charges except for the minor one of carrying an illegal firearm.

More brave blacks stepped forward in the Edmund Perry case a year later.

Perry, a black teenager from Phillips Exeter Academy, along with his brother, mugged a cop and ended up getting himself killed. When Perry's brother Jonah was prosecuted for the mugging, two of the witnesses against Jonah were his black neighbors.

One neighbor testified that Jonah told him the night of the incident that his brother was shot when they were mugging someone. Another neighbor said Jonah told her that night that he tried to beat up a guy who turned out to be a cop. This was in a courtroom full of rabble-rousers, amen-ing everything defense lawyer Alton Maddox said.

They told the truth knowing they'd have to go back to the neighborhood. Whatever happened to them? Why aren't they the heroes? Where's their Hollywood movie? There was a movie about the Perry case. It was titled: "Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story." (The grand jury had no difficulty finding the motive: The cop was being mugged.)

In the middle of one of these racial passion plays, it takes enormous courage for a black person to step forward and say, "Yeah, I heard him say he mugged the cop," "If I had been Bernie Goetz, I would have shot them, too," or "I know George, he's my friend."

That last one was Elouise Dilligard, George Zimmerman's final defense witness. Clear as a bell, this black woman spoke warmly about "my neighbor George" and went on to describe his nose being disfigured and bloody right after the shooting.

You won't see her on CNN, though. In fact, you'll never hear a peep about any of these courageous black people, unless you obsessively research every "race" case of the last 30 years, as I did for my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. (All these black heroes appear in my book.)

Whites never need to be brave this way. There's absolutely no pressure on white people to root for their race. In fact, there's often pressure to root against their race. Instead of being asked to weep over President Obama's ever having been looked at suspiciously (probably by Jesse Jackson), could we reflect on the fortitude of ordinary black citizens who resist "racial solidarity" and speak the truth?

One thing I noticed throughout the Martin/Zimmerman story cycle: the “opinion/fact” mutation. As more facts are introduced into the mix, opinions don’t disappear after being proven wrong, they simply mutate.

We’ve seen this with other issues and debates: global warming, for example, mutated into climate change. When statistics revealed that the earth hasn’t warmed in a decade and a half, you then offer opinions about climate in general to maintain your point of view. We do this all the time, in our personal lives, too. After we exhaust all opinions, we are ultimately left with, “I really don’t want to go see your mother.”

Opinion moves like water--when one path is blocked, it finds an alternative route. If the bad guy is white, but it turns out he isn’t white, he becomes “white Hispanic.” When you find out that nearly every person involved in the matter says race isn’t a factor, then the story becomes about “stand your ground.” And even if you find that “stand your ground” may not play a role, then it becomes a “national conversation” about “self-defense” or about “the system” in general. Every time you change the turf, the opposing teams just pick a different strategy to push their point of view.

The only consistency is Al Sharpton, who never lets a fact get in the way of his persona-building outrage. I’ve repeated his sordid past many times on TV, but one fact needs to be highlighted: in 1995, Sharpton--angry over the eviction of a black-owned record store, used his radio show and rallies to foment rage. As Jonah Goldberg points out in his most recent NY Post column on Sharpton, one of the rally protesters entered a Jewish-owned store whose owner had been incorrectly blamed for the eviction and shot the place up, people included. He then set fire to it. He killed seven occupants, which Goldberg points out, were mostly Hispanic.

So, that tragedy outdid Zimmerman by a factor of seven. I don’t think Al organized a protest for that. It’s something you run from, not march toward.

My gut always tells me the Zimmerman story was about an altercation between two men: one could fight, and one had a gun. I’m no fan of Zimmerman (this was a guy in love with law enforcement, which can be dangerous when left outside of law enforcement), but I also don’t think the case is an indictment on society. Even the President agrees that race relations are vastly improved (the President IS black, after all).

Why the racial climate is better yet we still have thousands of black homicides a year is the issue he really could--and should--sink his teeth into. If those murders are not race related, then what is it related to? The “context” of poverty doesn’t uniformly fly. A lot of people are poor and don’t kill each other. I was dirt broke for a long time, and crime never crossed my mind (although I considered table dancing for elderly men).
I’d like to see Obama address that issue. Instead, he says that Trayvon could have easily been him. Maybe so, but Zimmerman could easily have been him too. After all, Obama and Zimmerman have more in common than race traffickers will admit: a white parent. Zimmerman might have been a victim of racism at some point too... I have no idea.

And believe it or not, I’ve had people lock their car doors when they saw me. Mainly because, at the time, I was young, drunk, and walking toward them. One such memory: As I approached a parked car one night, an older woman inside frantically throttled the lock and pressed down hard. I reached for the keys that were still stuck in the exterior lock of her car, removed them and dangled them. She rolled down her window, and I handed them to her. She thanked me, with a hint of embarrassment. She was white, and so was I (at the time). But I would have done the same thing if I saw me coming. I looked grubby and bug-eyed.

And so within this current hysteria--a mix of real anger, legitimate anxiety, and ratings-grabbing sensationalism--some truth is lost, or mocked. Geraldo Rivera was mercilessly reamed for his statement about hoodies; his advice--not to wear them--was taken as a simplistic dismissal of a teenager’s death. Although, if you want to stare a hate fact right in its face, a kid wearing a hoodie at night, in a neighborhood riddled by burglaries--no matter the race--raises eyebrows. Thieves everywhere wear them to conceal appearances, and so it becomes a part of criminal profiling...not racial profiling. Rivera made the mistake of stating a fact when people really just wanted opinions. Even his kids were mad at him.

We saw this opinion/fact shift also with guns. We know where most of the gun crime originates from. But after atrocities like Sandy Hook, the argument became about “assault rifles.” Not illegal handguns, or gangs, or mental illness, or broken homes, all of which arguably play a greater role in gun death.
When those facts came out, the argument switched from evil assault rifles to the insidious power of the NRA, then the Second Amendment. We cling to emotional opinions--they’re like religion and guns--even when facts point us in other directions. It was another moment when the President could have focused on specific scourges, but didn’t, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

When the President brought up his kids and how they have such enlightened views on race, what he meant to say is: it never comes up. It’s true. He’s right. It’s met with, “What’s all this fuss about?” I see this with my niece and nephew. Race never, ever enters the picture. They think we are weird to obsess over it.
However, and it’s a big however, if teenagers have so little interest in this racial conflict, why does it continue to rear its ugly head later in life? What happens between the teenage years and young adulthood that turns the world into “us vs. them?”

College. Academia. It’s where race-baiting flourishes. It’s where, absent of competitive instincts that foster the learning of skills and desire for real achievement, we get divisive awareness raising that serves only to create agitation and pointless activism. A white or black kid seemingly unaware of the nature of “two Americas” when they’re seventeen is brainwashed by 21 into thinking that “white privilege” and “patriarchal oppression” are the true evils, propagated by the worst country ever.

This pernicious pit stop, called college, is where humanity is filled with racial outrage. It’s a gas station that serves anger, unleaded. College is a place where professors can make bank reminding the gullible that America is a bad bad place, and that things need to change--even if they hope it won’t. It guarantees them work and guest spots on Bill Maher’s Real Time. If someone, like the President, offered real solutions, they’d have to find real work.

There are glimmers of change. Look at Charles Barkley, Bill Cosby, Romany Malco, or Lupe Fiasco. None of them, I venture, are remotely conservative. I’d guess they all respect and admire President Obama. But all of them, regarding the Zimmerman trial, spoke truths that the President couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Why wouldn’t he? Because he is the product not of reality but of the teacher’s lounge. President Obama seemed to have such a hard time during that last press conference navigating the aftermath of the verdict, perhaps because he was parsing his words based on his ideological education. He could not say “gangs,” or “lack of fathers,” or “self-reliance,” because those words do not fit in the rhetoric of the polarity propagated on campus. There are times when he might refreshingly say “pull your pants up,” (which he did, once, I believe) but those moments are few and far between. Maybe he’s just not that guy.

My solution is, oddly, the same as Holder’s: an honest discussion on race. But herein lies the problem. Right now Obama exists in only one stripe of the race rainbow. He only talks to the Sharptons, but never the Steeles. Has he ever thought of sitting down and talking to Shelby Steele, or Thomas Sowell, or Larry Elder, or Ben Carson, or even Allen West?

Invite Lupe Fiasco to the White House for God’s sake!

As long as Obama relies on the Holders and the Reverend Al’s of the world for perspective, nothing will change. Cities like Detroit will continue to crumble, and prisons will become the closest to communities many young blacks have.

President Obama has three years and change to actually make change, to stand up and lead, to call those who consider him their leader to actually listen to ugly truths and positive solutions. If he did that, even I’d vote him in for a third term... and I didn’t vote for him twice.

Detroit's City Council has come under fire for spending time this week writing, voting and passing a resolution supporting a federal investigation into George Zimmerman instead of focusing on its own financial blunders and ballooning crime rate.

Zimmerman, a Florida neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted July 13 in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin.

The unanimous vote by the members of the Detroit council on a crime that took place six states and hundreds of miles away came just two days after the Motor City’s latest gun-related death – its 176th homicide of the year.

I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.
Apparently other Americans also recognize that the sources of racism are different today from what they were in the past. According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks think that most blacks are racists, while 24 percent of blacks think that most whites are racist.

The difference between these percentages is not great, but it is remarkable nevertheless. After all, generations of blacks fought the white racism from which they suffered for so long. If many blacks themselves now think that most other blacks are racist, that is startling.

The moral claims advanced by generations of black leaders -- claims that eventually touched the conscience of the nation and turned the tide toward civil rights for all -- have now been cheapened by today's generation of black "leaders," who act as if it is all just a matter of whose ox is gored.

Even in legal cases involving terrible crimes -- the O.J. Simpson murder trial or the charges of gang rape against Duke University students -- many black "leaders" and their followers have not waited for facts about who was guilty and who was not, but have immediately taken sides, based on who was black and who was white.

Among whites, according to the same Rasmussen poll, 38 percent consider most blacks racist and 10 percent consider most whites racist.

Broken down by politics, the same poll showed that 49 percent of Republicans consider most blacks racist, as do 36 percent of independents and 29 percent of Democrats.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, just 29 percent of Americans as a whole think race relations are getting better, while 32 percent think race relations are getting worse. The difference is too close to call, but the fact that it is so close is itself painful -- and perhaps a warning sign for where we are heading.

Is this what so many Americans, both black and white, struggled for, over the decades and generations, to try to put the curse of racism behind us -- only to reach a point where retrogression in race relations now seems at least equally likely as progress?

What went wrong? Perhaps no single factor can be blamed for all the things that went wrong. Insurgent movements of all sorts, in countries around the world, have for centuries soured in the aftermath of their own success. "The revolution betrayed" is a theme that goes back at least as far as 18th century France.

The civil rights movement in 20th century America attracted many people who put everything on the line for the sake of fighting against racial oppression. But the eventual success of that movement attracted opportunists, and even turned some idealists into opportunists.

Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans. After the success of the civil rights insurgency, the latter have come into their own, gaining money, power and fame by promoting racial attitudes and actions that are counterproductive to the interests of those they lead.

None of this is unique to blacks or to the United States. In various countries and times, leaders of groups that lagged behind, economically and educationally, have taught their followers to blame all their problems on other people -- and to hate those other people.

This was the history of anti-Semitic movements in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars, anti-Ibo movements in Nigeria in the 1960s, and anti-Tamil movements that turned Sri Lanka from a peaceful nation into a scene of lethal mob violence and then decades-long civil war, both marked by unspeakable atrocities.

Groups that rose from poverty to prosperity seldom did so by having racial or ethnic leaders. While most Americans can easily name a number of black leaders, current or past, how many can name Asian American ethnic leaders or Jewish ethnic leaders?

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.