A stat by itself without any context at all is just a number without meaning and hence can't be racist, but that is somewhat meaningless as you always have some

A stat by itself without any context at all is just a number without meaning and hence can't be racist, but that is somewhat meaningless as you always have some context, even if it's the context of intentionally just presenting the state by itself without any other context related to it. And the moment you put it into natural language you likely will lose some context (if you don't write a large paper and only consider the paper as a whole and not single sentences by it in isolation) and there is some risk to (potentially unintentionally) imply some implicit context many readers will have. Depending on that the sentence it may always be racist, or may be racist when ignoring the surrounding sentences etc. To some degree you could say it most times depends on usage, but then with LLMs and other AI I wouldn't say it requires persons to be involved. Lastly, but that's a different discussion, a stat by itself could be racist if the statistics it is from where designed to promote racist belies or similar (could also happen accidental due to e.g. naivety or not understanding the topic).