These are all good points. I'm mainly frustrated by the tendency of people to grab hold of a statistic and direct it in whichever way they please. I see a lot of people in this topic crying foul that men receive more jail time than women. But the way you phrase it directly affects how you conceive of policy based solutions. As in "Men are being discriminated against, we need to balance this out by matching their sentences to the one's women get" which doesn't make any policy sense, when Men account for 90% of the crime committed in the United States.

otherwise you could dismiss any claim of racism by saying that people aren't racist towards black people, they're just benevolent towards everyone else.

This is exactly right, I agree completely. Semantics and perspective get all twisted. Consider that in your counter example, in the USA the demographics skew 90-10 M/F for criminal population and 75-15 White/Black for general population, and the comparisons start to look unfair, the groups receiving benevolent treatment are vastly different sizes by comparison (75%, Whites, versus 10%, females). It's not as though 90% of the prison is population is receiving more lenient sentencing. If you think that wage disparity between sexes can be explained away by accounting for variables like work life balance, and hours worked, then you can say the same about this. Men as criminals spend more time and energy in the criminal justice system, it stands to reason they'd get harsher sentences, harsher crimes, more recidivism, etc.

But in the end -isms like racism and sexism have to do with power and who has it amongst demographic groups. And there's power in numbers, and representation. The definitions of these words are starting to drift strangely..

It's the same same smoke and mirrors language that feminism uses, that so many people find frustrating.