The thing is averages don’t mean shit when you’re talking about individual people, because individual experiences always deviate from the average, especially if you talk about average wealth where a few millionaires and billionaires skew the data for a lot of poor people.

i’m sorry, but “averages don’t mean shit when you’re talking about individual people” is such a cop out. statistical measures are literally THE MOST reliable way of determining truth that we have, and its basically the only way to prove something is real with high certainty. do you seriously think that professional sociologists don’t take outliers into account when talking about average wealth? that’s like, literally grade school statistics, the kind of analysis being done for measures of social well-being are built to account for confounding variables, and a discrepancy still exists when you control for pretty much every other factor.

But sure, let’s follow your logic. Black people on average are poorer and have worse jobs, so we need to discriminate in their favour. Well, statistically there is also a lot of evidence that black people on average commit more crimes than white people. So should I be scared of a black person I cross on the street? Following your logic, yes. Following mine, no.

i’m not following a “logic”, i’m presenting what the research has shown to be factual, or at least highly likely. we do know that black people on average commit more crimes. if you want to use that as an excuse to discriminate against black people, you can do that, but an evidence based look into why crime happens and what factors go into why somebody commits crimes does not support that position. because yes, criminologists and sociologists have actually examined the “why” of the statistical connection between criminal behavior and blackness, and didn’t just stop at “oh, black people are statistically over-represented in prison populations, that’s weird.”

we know that poverty is like, THE determining factor in criminality. people who are in desperate straits are far more likely to commit crimes, black or not. because black people are more likely than white people to be in poverty, they are also statistically more likely to commit crime. of course, being convicted of a crime then makes it harder to get work, and puts significant financial burden on the family of the incarcerated, driving the incarcerated person and their loved ones further into poverty, and increasing their likelihood to commit crime in the future as their circumstances worsen. that doesn’t account for everything, though. we also know that black people are significantly more likely to be convicted and sentenced when they do interact with the justice system, and white people can often avoid jail time that is inevitable for comparable crimes committed by a black person.

in fact, the systemic factors which drive the impoverishment of black people are the largely the same factors which drive criminal behavior in black people, and which punish black people more harshly if they do end up committing crimes. systemic racism. poverty. urban decay. the prison industrial complex. discriminatory laws. there is metric shit-tons of literature out there for you to read on this stuff, as you obviously have not done, considering that you wrote “black people are poorer than white people” and “black people commit more crimes than white people” right next to each other, and failed to even consider how those two statements might be related before defaulting to a 50 year old racist talking point.

i get that you’ve bought into the whole “actually its the LEFT who are the racist ones” talking point, and maybe even the “christian white men are the most oppressed group in this country” talking point, but there are thousands of empirical studies showing that people of color, and especially black people, are faced with specific challenges when it comes to acquiring a decent quality of life, and that these challenges cannot be explained away as anything other than an ongoing social process by which black people are deprived of resources by virtue of their identity.