Take the situation with Islam, for example. If, as some of us believe, Islam is an inherently violent and oppressive ideology, then pretending otherwise is a dangerous delusion — one that may have cost the lives of literally hundreds of thousands either dead or dying at the hands of Islamic supremacists.

Closer to home, look at the tragedy of our broken urban sub-culture. More than 70% of black children are born out of wedlock into fatherless households. A black man is seven times more likely to commit murder than a man who isn’t black. The once strong black family has been in decay for forty years, its healthy culture replaced by crime, dysfunction, and hopelessness.

We should be talking about that. We shouldn’t pretend that the tired old race-hustlers, the Jacksons and Sharptons and Wrights and Obamas, have the answers to this problem. Their creed of endless victimhood and resentment has made things worse, not better — has doomed generations of young black men to ignorance, joblessness, and crime.

We can watch what’s going on in Ferguson and pretend that the problem is still, in some mysterious way, the white man’s foot on the throat of the black — this at a time when our black president enjoys his second term in office.

Or we can admit that the systems we created ostensibly to help the predominantly black urban family have had the opposite effect, and that it’s time to stop hurting and start undoing the damage our irresponsible experiments in social engineering have achieved.

But we can’t get there if we keep pretending that the only important question is whether or not the man in Ferguson really needed to be shot. Something very bad is happening in our cities, and we have to start talking about it.