Editor’s note: The following is based on a monologue delivered on the July 30, 2013 edition of Fox News Channel’s “The Five” and an op-ed that appeared previously in Fox News Opinion.

Race has been the topic over the last couple weeks, but if we’re going to do this right, if we’re going to have an honest discussion among people who care about the problems inside the black community, we have to be dealing with honest brokers.  Unfortunately, a lot of people in the so- called civil rights community are frauds, outright hucksters.

Two of the worst: civil rights activist and MSNBC host Al Sharpton and Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson. Their goal: demonize white people, especially conservatives like Bill O’Reilly, so they don’t have to deal with the real problems that continue to plague the black community.  Making an older, conservative white guy like O’Reilly a boogie man is easy for these hustlers.

But do they ever confront the real problems and threats in the minority community? No.
High murder rates?  How about that?  What about high dropout rates?  What about the breakdown of the family?

I bet you think I’m exaggerating.  Well, here’s this from Michael Eric Dyson:

“Why is it that when we say we want to have a conversation on race, you want a conversation on blackness?  You don’t want to have a conversation on race.  You don’t want to have a conversation on white privilege, unconscious bias.  You don’t want to talk about the collective world we made as black, brown, red, yellow and white people.  You want to lecture black people.

So, Mr. O’Reilly, I’d love to have that conversation about protecting yourself behind white picket fences and Fox News and having digital courage. Come in the streets where you went to Sylvia, and you were surprised that black people don’t throw bananas at each other or swing from trees.”

Can you believe that? This is unbelievable on so many levels. But let me just start by saying this: Dyson is making the charge basically that O’Reilly is portraying black people as animals. And, of course, this never happened.  This is not true.

In the whole episode (when he visited Sylvia’s restaurant), which O’Reilly and I talked about on the radio, was going on about defeating racial stereotypes in this society.  But that’s not what Michael Eric Dyson wants to do here.  He wants to hold up somehow that Bill O’Reilly is a racist and target of the conversation and therefore we should be about, somehow, going after Bill O’Reilly.

Well, who does that help?  Let’s think about that for a second.  If this is a real conversation about helping people, if you truly love people, and want to help those in need, how does it help to go after conservatives, O’Reilly, white people, rich people?  Let’s go to the people who need help and give them help.

But that’s not what Michael Eric Dyson is doing.  Oh, no.  When you start asking questions like well, are you doing anything to help the schools in the inner-city?  No.

What about the carnage on black streets with kids shooting each other?  No.

What about, you know, any of the issues attached to family breakdown, 70 percent of children born out of wedlock?  What about that?  No.

So what we’re doing here is a huge distraction.  Yes, there’s legitimate rage in the black community over the Zimmerman verdict, but the idea that we have to use the power that exists in this country to help people who are in need in the black community, that is an ongoing and longer story and you can’t pull away from that by making Bill O’Reilly into your target and somehow beating him up.  That’s craziness.

So what can we do, what should we do to start helping people who are in need in the African-American community today? I wrote about this in my book, “Enough” and recently in an opinion piece for FoxNews.com.

Here’s the message I would like to see expressed in America today. I think it would be especially powerful if it could come from the black man with the highest level of credibility in black America since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – President Obama.

1.  Stay in school and graduate from the highest level of school – but absolutely, no excuses, graduate from high school.

2. Take a job and hold it, no matter what job, no matter if your friends put you down for ‘flipping burgers.’ Use the job to get experience, make contacts with business people, and build a resume.

3. Marry after you have finished your education and while you have a job.

And the final step is important for you and for the future of your family and your community:

4. Don’t have children until you are at least 21-years-old and married.

Imagine if President Obama repeated that message over and over, ignoring the phonies who want to focus only on “systemic” racism as the reason for high rates of poverty, involvement with crime, and incarceration among black men.

Imagine if the president delivered that message despite attempts to intimidate him by civil rights leaders.

Imagine if he decided to deliver that message and by-passed the so-called ‘racial experts’ and academics who prefer to look at America’s troubled racial history – slavery and legal segregation.

The answer is the president could make a difference in millions of lives and build a legacy on par with Dr. King.

Mr. President it is your move.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst. He is the author of several books including “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America–and What We Can Do About It” and “Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate.”

Former President Jimmy Carter broke with many liberal commentators yesterday when he told an NBC television affiliate that the jury’s acquittal of George Zimmerman was “the right decision.”

“I think the jury made the right decision based in the evidence presented. It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”

When asked if race was at the root of the shooting or of the jury’s decision, Carter elected to speak about the facts of the case, not a private interpretation. He explained that placing current racial tension in historical context, Americans are making good progress in the civil rights arena.

PUBLIUS

With all of the outrage from the black ‘leadership’ in the nation about Trayvon Martin being killed in the act of attacking a neighborhood watch person, the fact remains that 93% of African-American murders are committed by other African-Americans.

In fact, nearly 9,000 African-Americans are murdered each year; 93% of them by other blacks–nearly 8,000–and that doesn’t account for the 1 million black babies that are aborted by ‘pro-black, pro-women’ groups each year.

So where are the black leaders on any given day, when 22 young blacks have been murdered by another young black?

As we reported in our article Zimmerman: The Subtext, July 8, 2013:

The truth is that liberals in America refuse to accept any part of the truth that blacks commit most of the crime in this country. Like Trayvon Martin, many young thugs wearing hoodies and pants below butt cracks terrorize whites and others, at will, threatening and attacking anyone who challenges their criminal or suspicious behavior. Their neighborhoods are virtual war zones, where bullets fly to enforce criminals territories.

Remember, blacks only account for 12% of our population, and young black men account for only about 4% of the US population. According to a report released by the New Century Foundation, The Color of Crime:

• Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
• When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
• Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.
• The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.
• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and whites, blacks commit 85 percent and whites commit 15 percent.
• Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.
• Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

These statistics evidence a very serious problem in our country–one that turning a blind eye won’t resolve–that many young black men are violent criminals. If this statement offends you–answer the question, who in America feels safe walking through a predominantly black neighborhood after dark? Do our African-American brothers and sisters feel safe walking though their own neighborhoods at night?

In fact, the entitlement policies of the left have bred a generation of criminals, and our black brothers and sisters are drowning in a sea of apathy and neglect. (See our article Dems Hurting Minorities, June 8, 2013) The same policies that have created the problem are being escalated annually, and the resulting difficulties of young black men have increased exponentially–nearly to the point where the majority of them have a better chance of going to prison than to college. The only thing that has prevented the escalation of crime rates in America is the abortion policies of the left, which are aimed directly at reducing the black population. (See our article Should GOP Rethink Abortion Policy?, Nov. 29, 2012)

George Zimmerman has given America a wake up call. He refused to turn a blind eye to the truth that skulking young blacks in hoodies and low-rider pants are suspicious in a middle-class neighborhood–a fact that every American knows, but the left has made a social crime to speak out loud. It is our hope that black “leaders” will redirect their feigned outrage to the real issues facing their constituents (the number of blacks that died at the hands of blacks in Chicago over the recent holiday should spark true outrage), and enlist the help of responsible politicians and citizens to begin the arduous process of rehabilitating an entire generation of lost black Americans.

PUBLIUS