An oped in today’s paper designated the word "thug as a “problem word” - essentially an attempt to get around using the N-word.
Do you agree?
I am often confused by what I perceive as changing language usage, but I generally try to avoid unintentional offense.
In my experience, thug historically referred to unintelligent violent people. A loan shark’s enforcers. Strikebreakers. The 1/6 Capitol invaders. … In my mind, such thugs were generally white.
Some time back, I became aware of some rappers self describing thug life. (Am I incorrect in presuming the rappers declared themselves thugs, or was the term applied to them by whites?) So I adjusted my mental image and began thinking of some people of color as acting/looking like thugs or gangsta rappers. I’ve since thought of certain young white people as thugs if they dress and act in certain ways.
If my recollection is accurate, it strikes me as curious if some blacks began using the term in a certain way, but then when whites accepted that usage, the whites’ use of the word became considered racist.
The only time I really see people suggesting it shouldn’t be used is far, far off the rails left (Social Justice Warriors) saying (telling us) that it doesn’t just mean violent person or gang member, that it’s specifically a racist term on par with the n-word. And, while the term may be used to describe black people more than white people, so far as I know, it’s not reserved for a single race.
Of course, I also saw this same person chastise someone for saying “LeBron James is my spirit animal” calling them a racist for describing a black person as an animal.
Having said that, I avoid it for the same reasons as the OP, if the meaning of a word is questionable (WRT race), I’ll just do my best to leave it alone. If members of the black community feel it’s racist and they’re offended by the term, it’s a good enough reason for me to stop using it. If it’s [white] social justice warriors deciding, on their own, that Black People should be offended by it and therefore white people shouldn’t use it, I might need some more convincing.
It is a word I avoid, as when I hear it used, it is almost always directed at minorities. Not always, mind you, but enough that it’s a word I am uncomfortable using, no matter whether anyone tells me it’s okay or not.
I was born in 1960 and as far back as I remember hearing it, it was a brutish criminal (street thug) or as mentioned upthread, a strikebreaker(union thug). I learned about thuggee much later but still long before rap took the term.
I’m not seeing any dictionary definitions which incorporate a racial element. Merriam-Webster says “a violent or brutal criminal or bully”, which isn’t intrinsically racist but certainly overlaps with racist stereotypes of blacks. I don’t know what percentage of the time the word is used as a racist euphemism, but it seems fair to say it isn’t zero.
I can’t read your link because of paywall, but here are a couple articles making that case.
Here’s a notable quote from the second one:
Like the N-word, thug was reappropriated in the late 20th century. Just a few years after the L.A. supergroup N.W.A took the reappropriated N-word mainstream, Tupac Shakur broke out with THUG LIFE tattooed across his chest. “White folks see us as thugs,” Shakur said in one notable speech. “I don’t care if you think you’re a lawyer, if you’re a man, if you’re an African American, if you’re whatever the f— you think you are. We’re thugs and n-----s to these motherf-----s.”
So it appears that the black people who started using it to describe themselves at least perceived that they were appropriating a word white people were already using to describe them. And they perceived that they were being called this due to their race and not due to their actual behavior.
Conclusion: Might as well err on the side of not using words which some people find problematic. It’s not like English doesn’t have dozens of perfectly good synonyms available.
That’s how I grew up knowing it. It wasn’t racial. “Common thug” and all that was used, but over time it feels like the word’s meaning has shifted in the common parlance, so I avoid it.
The origin of a term is utterly irrelevant to current usage.
For most of my life, a thug was merely a criminal, and could be of any race or nationality. As the OP writes, though, it was appropriated by black culture and so has become a term associated with and aimed at blacks. In 2015, back when Baltimore exploded into riots, thug was an epithet generally hurled at the black participants and even used by judges. Hard to argue that it wasn’t a specifically racial use.
Yeah, that makes it problematic for white users. Whether it’s equivalent to the n-word is a different question. Since Obama himself called the Baltimore crowd “criminals and thugs” I’d say no. But that was six years ago and the world has continued to change.
IMO it can be a racial slur. It’s not always used as a racial slur. Calling peaceful BLM protesters “a pack of thugs” would be using it as a racial slur – calling the violent insurrectionists of Jan 6th “a pack of thugs” would not be. IMO.
Here’s an NPR piece from five years ago about “thug” being adopted as a “new euphemism” and dog- whistle.
Here’s a more recent piece
Many years ago I wouldn’t have said the word was racially charged, but it does seem to have developed that way of late. I have heard black people described as “thugs”, but I can’t recall hearing that word used for white malefactors, even the ones at the Capitol on January 6.
None of this has anything to do, really, with the word’s origin in referring to members of the Thuggee cult. From all accounts – and I’ve read quite a bit about them – they weren’t a nice bunch of people and they were hard to root out. They preyed on innocents, and don’t appear to me to be any sort of nefarious plot by the British to justify colonial rule. On the other hand, talking about them can easily descend into racist tropes. Even though Spielberg and company tried to emphasize what the historical facts were, a lot of people came out of the second Indiana Jones movie with very negative and undeserved impressions of Indian religions.
Strikes me as odd. I recall in the 00s, when the Patriot Act was passed, folk discussing whether “jackbooted thugs” would be knocking down doors. And 2 months ago, I thought the insurrectionists were referred to as thugs. Are either of those usages inappropriate? Was there any reasonable interpretations that those were euphemisms for racial slurs?
Or if a particular rapper declared himself to be leading the thug life. Is it racist to call that person a thug?
As so often in such instances, I wonder exactly how many people, and what types of people, are objecting to the term.
I wouldn’t agree because the term is still used often enough to describe non-black people that it shouldn’t be regarded as a slur against black people.
Antifa, the Chinese Communist Party and its violent supporters in Hong Kong, etc. have all been described as “jackbooted thugs” here or there.
I think it’s very much context dependent and has changed in my lifetime.
When I was growing up in the U.K., it was certainly not associated in any way with racial minorities. In that culture, a (white) football hooligan would readily have come to mind. I haven’t lived in the U.K. for some time, not sure if that’s still true there. I’m not sure if I would feel the need to avoid using it myself in the U.K., and I would certainly not make any negative assumptions about hearing it there.
But in the U.S. today, although there is no explicit association with race, I think what has happened is that it has become a dog-whistle term used by racists to describe “uppity” young black men when they cannot get away with using the word they really want to use. That baggage makes it very difficult for anyone to use now.
It certainly can have racist connotations, and it’s use applied to white people doesn’t negate that.
White police officers clubbing protesters can be called thugs. White insurrectionist storming the Capitol can be called thugs. But a Black male gets called a thug just for wearing a hoodie. It’s the asymmetry in its use between races that makes it problematic.
Cops and others have made “thug” into a racial slur just by using primarily for black people, particularly black men, regardless of whether there is any evidence that the people so labeled are criminals.
At the start of this thread I thought about what image came to my mind and it was exactly the same as yours: a white football hooligan. So this must be more unique to an American audience (I’m in the UK). I still hear the word thug being used and there are zero racial connotations that I have ever detected. But I daresay that will change soon if this is being mooted as a problem in the US.