All right, let me make this simple: There is NO volume of crime committed by people with whom I share a non-criminal characteristic that would justify abridging my freedom to come and go, to walk down any street. None.

In response to the demand that George Zimmerman be brought to justice — and that’s all Trayvon’s family is asking for, justice, including a fair trial before a jury and with a presumption of innocence — people are, predictably, bringing out stats on what proportion of violent crime is committed by young African-American males. I guess that makes it somehow “reasonable” to object to an unarmed black kid walking through your neighborhood. Now, maybe it’s true that a disproportionate share of violent crime is committed by African-Americans. (A hundred and fifty years ago, you could have said the same about Irish people.) But there’s no way to cook the figures to make them say that a high proportion, let alone most, African-Americans are violent criminals. It can’t be done.

What people are really saying is that the fear that some white people feel when they see young African-American males should trump the freedom of those young men to come and go freely. There could be no clearer example of a claim of privilege. And it is that sort of privilege that we’ve been struggling to ge rid of for the last fifty years.

The freedom and right to inclusion of people who have been kept out trump the fear and discomfort of those who would rather not accept them. Even if it’s true that young African-American men are (statistically) more likely to be criminals, it’s still not all right to want to stop them walking down your street. Even if it were true that all the terrorist acts in this country are committed by Muslims — it’s actually less than half, but that doesn’t stop the Right from saying so — it would still not be acceptable to want to keep them out of your town. That’s not how we’re supposed to do things in this country.

Get over it.

Why do people like George Zimmerman get so much of a pass?

There’s a piece in the latest Time by Touré on the advice that has to be given to young African-American men about staying alive in the face of racism. Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking about the advice people have to give their daughters about things like not going out alone at night or not getting drunk at parties where they don’t know people. Women shouldn’t have to worry about those things but … they do. And it’s something that everyone has to tell their daughters about. At the same time, however, if a woman is not careful — or not careful enough — and the worst happens, we don’t have a problem with saying that it’s not her fault that she got raped. It’s entirely on the guy who did it. How is it different when the problem is a young African-American male who gets shot for nothing more than walking down the wrong street?

Let’s be honest. Geraldo Rivera was onto something when he talked about — and pandered to — white people who freak out when they see a black kid in their neighborhoods. That does happen. But why is there a sense that we should “understand” their “concerns”? Why is it so hard to say the obvious? It’s not all right to want your neighborhood to stay white. It’s not all right to want the country not to become majority nonwhite. And it’s not all right to call the cops just because a law-abiding, unarmed African-American — even a tall, dark-complected, male teenager … in a hoodie! — is walking down your street. Whatever unresolved questions there may be in this case, we know for a fact that George Zimmerman did that — and it wasn’t the first time. Why do we have trouble saying that?

Are we so afraid of being called “intolerant,” or even “haters,” that we’re uncomfortable with calling the racists out? Have the racists so thoroughly mastered the vocabulary of victimization that we’re letting them deploy it against us — against Americans who want the future of equality and inclusion?

No one can control his or her feelings. (Even Jesse Jackson has apparently admitted sometimes being uneasy in the presence of black male teenagers.) So we can’t fault people for how they feel. But we can demand that people not act on those feelings. If white people are frightened around black people, it’s not for the black people to change. It’s for the whites to learn to put a sock in it.

Let’s start saying that.

It’s official.

The latest census finds that a majority of all Americans under two years old are not white. (It’s under five in some of our largest states — including California, New York, and Texas, with Illinois and Virginia on the way.) The Right wing has started whining about abolishing birth-right citizenship — just because they’re the majority doesn’t mean we have to let them vote — but there is no turning this aside. White Christian-dominated America is going down.

So what will it all mean? It’s always dangerous to generalize but … contrary to what some people would like to tell you, nonwhite Americans, by and large, are as patriotic as anyone else. They find a great deal to value in the American political tradition.

But it’s not necessarily the same things. And they don’t necessarily put the same “spin” on them. In a nonwhite-majority America, maybe the fact that there was slavery in the early Republic will not be merely an embarrassing — but ultimately unimportant — detail. Same for the dispossession of the Native Americans. Most important, white people will no longer have the power to decide what these things really mean for the American political community. They will no longer be able to insist that their system (free-market capitalism) be seen as a just system which has enriched those who deserve to come out on top; American history will no longer be the story of how the deserving won, but how the oppressors abused everyone else — and how everyone else fought back.

This will likely take a while, but victory is in sight.