You're assuming a causal relationship when the claim is correlational. The claim is not that because of a person's ethnicity that person will commit crimes at a certain rate, the claim is that you can make a good guess about criminality based on ethnicity. That is to say, there is a correlation. Which is unambiguously true--just look up the numbers. Only takes a moment.

In either case, whether it's racist or not is irrelevant to the issue at hand.

> the claim is that you can make a good guess about criminality based on ethnicity

Yes. That is the claim that is racist.

It is empirically true. It is, of course, possible for things to be both true and racist, for some definition of racist.

The fact that you just stop the train of thought there is the racist part.

What would be the non-racist thing to do?

Actually look for the real factors beyond "ethnicity".

My honest read here, and I really wish to emphasize that this is honest feedback and not an attempt to put you down, is that you don't have a solid grasp of causation vs. correlation.

I appreciate you engaging. It's fun and important to talk about stuff like this.

My point is literally that you need to think harder about causation vs. correlation here.

Criminality might correlate with ethnicity. Assuming this means causality is the thing that is racist.