A Bad Stat, and the Wrong Word

I just finished reading Camille Dungy's 2023 memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden as part of a book group. I recommend it generally.

There was one particular set of facts she relayed late in the book that I didn't know specifically, though it fits with others that are familiar. 

It comes up at a point in late spring or summer of 2020, when Dungy's husband has been on a long bike ride. She tells her friend Tim, who is white, that she tracks her husband's whereabouts with her phone while he's on his rides. 

Their conversation was just a few months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by white men while jogging in Georgia, and of course, not long after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.

After recounting their conversation, she goes on to write,

A recent national study reveals that Black cyclists are 4.5 times more likely to die in an accident than white cyclists. Law enforcement agents in cities around the country cite Black cyclists at grossly disproportionate rate. Though the population of Tampa, Florida, is only 25 percent Black, Black cyclists accounted for 80 percent of the city's bicycle citations in 2015. In a nine-month span in 2017, Chicago law enforcement agents issue 321 citations to cyclists in Austin, a predominately Black neighborhood, and only 5 in predominately white Lincoln Park (page 235). 

I found a 2022 article about that national study. The higher rate of death for Black cyclists, it turns out, isn't because they ride bikes more than white people. In fact, it's the opposite:

...Black residents logged proportionally fewer miles on foot, bike, or car than most other groups, relative to their share of the population, according to the National Household Travel Survey data from which the stats were sourced.... White cyclists, who are the demographic group most likely to ride exclusively for recreation or sport rather than transportation, logged significantly more miles per capita than cyclists from other demographics...

This 4.5x statistic raises the question that I always ask when things like this arise: when there's clearly either a structural problem at fault (such as the road designs in Black communities vs. white ones) or overt racism of drivers (!)... are those "accidents"? 

Can we stop using that word and start using at least a neutral word instead, like crash? Calling them accidents is adding insult to injury, or in this case, death.