Not to be "that stats guy", but i think the phrase you're looking for in your second paragraph there is the "American average", which is a totally different con

Not to be "that stats guy", but i think the phrase you're looking for in your second paragraph there is the "American average", which is a totally different concept from the "average American". If you must use the concept of an average American (which I'm generally against because people/entities with multiple dependent and interlinked characteristics are not numbers and so average is pretty ill defined), I think general consensus is that your first measure of median would be more appropriate.