Yes. Cops kill white people at a higher rate than they do black people.
Well, a fag used to refer to a cigarette but I’m pretty sure it refers to a specific group within the population now. Language changes. Words take on a history.
I agree that there might be some contexts in which “thug” in reference to a black person isn’t racist. I don’t tend to view it as offensive as, say, the n-bomb, but casual references to black men as looking or acting like “thugs” or “ghetto thugs” is a reference that embeds some cultural meaning.
No. Just no. You do not get to make these false claims and get away with it. You know who says otherwise? Fucking PNAS.
Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex
Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men.
It’s not even close.
Dumping citeless racist nonsense into a thread is despicable.
What’s that you say? That’s only one paper? I need more cites? Hey, no problem.
Number of people shot to death by the police in the United States from 2017 to 2021, by race
the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 35 fatal shootings per million of the population as of February 2021
Not enough of a big name? How about the NIH? Are they a good source?
Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement
Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites.
So, let me repeat myself. No. Just plain no. You will not get away with this obscenity. It stops here and now.
Miller participated in a Northeastern-Harvard data-driven study that combed through shooting deaths by police across 27 states in 2014-15, based on details culled from police and medical-examiner reports by the National Violent Death Reporting System . It found that Black people were killed at a rate higher than their proportion to the national population.
“Although Black people represented 12 percent of the population in the states we studied, they made up 25 percent of the deaths in police shootings,” Miller says.
In an analysis of 4,653 fatal shootings for which information about both race and age were available, the researchers found a small but statistically significant decline in white deaths (about 1%) but no significant change in deaths for BIPOC. There were 5,367 fatal police shootings during that five-year period, according to the Post’s database. In the case of armed victims, Native Americans were killed by police at a rate three times that of white people (77 total killed). Black people were killed at 2.6 times the rate of white people (1,265 total killed); and Hispanics were killed at nearly 1.3 times the rate of white people (889 total killed). Among unarmed victims, Black people were killed at three times the rate (218 total killed), and Hispanics at 1.45 times the rate of white people (146 total killed).
My error. I should NOT have said “rate”. I’m wrong.
So: It’s OK to call the people who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol and tried to lynch various people and subvert our democracy “a bunch of thugs”.
Except for this guy. You can call him a jerk, and an asshole, and an alt-right Trump-supporting seditionist. You can call him a moron (in a non-clinical way) for throwing in with a bunch of Confederate-Flag-waving QAnon-believing undoubtedly-racist probably-wondering-what-the-hell-that-one-black-dude-over-there-is-even-doing-here-with-the-rest-of-us-“patriots”…thugs. But he’s not a thug.
“Hey, remember that time when all those thugs (and that one guy, who is undoubtedly a moron, in a non-clinical way) stormed the U.S. Capitol and wanted to lynch the Vice President and the Speaker of the House and overthrow the Republic by force and violence?”
Remind me, which particular demographic group gets treated specially again?
No, you can call him a thug if you want. You’re not a victim here, no matter how hard you want to be.
Ya know what the thread is missing? All of those cites where White people are being called thugs for the same reason* Black people are.
Funny that.
*Like playing football.
Rugby Union: A thug’s game played by gentlemen.
Rugby League: A gentlemen’s game played by thugs.
As I stated above, I have a personal and pragmatic reason to avoid it. It’s a word that is most certainly used where I live as a code for minorities, almost always Blacks. This was not something taught to me, this was something I noticed from usage. I understand everyone has a different experience with the word, and live in different parts of the country/world. I live in the Southwest Side of Chicago, and there can be quite a bit of racism here. The old code word, at least in my neighborhood and the surrounding ones, believe it or not, was “Canadians.” This was like in the late 90s/early 00s. Blacks were “Canadians.” I guess they discovered that was a little too obvious, and the word shifted, at least as I saw and felt it, to “thugs.”
Context, of course, matters. When I hear an older person use the word “thugs” (well, a generation older than me – I’m 45), I take the word in the old sense I grew up with, which did not have racial overtones, or, if it did, I was not keen enough to catch them. But now, when a person my age uses the word, it most often has a distinct racial tinge to it. Once again, not always, but more often than not.
So I avoid it, because I have experienced the word used in ways that are more-than-clearly signifying something more than a criminal character, but people of a certain skin color. (Like I have literally asked “what do you mean by thugs?” and gotten a straight answer of “Blacks” or whatever word(s) were used. Why use code when they were happy to clarify for me, I don’t know other than force of habit.) It is used by a segment of the population that equates most Blacks with violent criminals. “Gang banger,” meanwhile, doesn’t carry that connotation. I have not encountered that word in a way I felt was veiling racial biases.
Nobody had to tell me this. I didn’t get a letter from the department of political correctness and woke speech informing me of the latest changes to the dictionary. Now where you all live, it may be different, but that is my reality. And that’s why I avoid it. Language shifts and evolves and many words and phrases I grew up with have different connotations now. In reverse, we have “queer” which was a slur growing up and now is largely accepted and preferred in certain contexts.
I think this is all sensible, pragmatic, and culturally aware. I make no effort to be “woke” or any some such thing. I do make an effort to be aware of what words I use, appreciate their power, and adjust my speech accordingly and in context.
Asian is a proper adjective like European, American, African, etc. That’s not special treatment now is it? That’s equal treatment with the use of the normal rules of grammar. If at some point the rules officially change where all adjectives that describe a human become properized I might adjust. But a set of different rules for different groups is bigoted.
Funny, Ida thought insisting on black instead of Black when pretty much every other group gets capitalized was special treatment and different rules…
Are you serious that you don’t understand the difference between common and proper adjectives? Words like male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, tall, short, fat, skinny, black, brown, white, are considered common adjectives and not capitalized. Now, obviously, some folks are capitalizing some or all of the skin color adjectives but that’s not my preference of writing. I think the rationale is primitive, overly generalized, and contradictory to valuing individuals as such.
It’s not just a skin color adjective.
I’m not sure what you are getting at.
I’m not claiming to be any kind of victim. I’m just saying I find some of these hair-splitting distinctions to be absurd.
Calling people who aren’t being “violent or brutish criminals or bullies” “thugs” is rude. Calling an African-American who isn’t being a “violent or brutish criminal or bully” a “thug” is very likely racist (and if someone habitually calls African-Americans “thugs” even when they aren’t being “violent or brutish criminals or bullies”–even if all they’re doing is wearing hoodies–you can strike the “very likely” part).
Calling people who are being “violent or brutish criminals or bullies” “thugs”–like if those people are storming the U.S. Capitol in order to try to violently steal an election–seems pretty fair to me.
If you want to argue that we shouldn’t call anyone a thug, because the term has too much racial baggage (either from its original etymology, or due to more recent developments in American English, or both)…well, I’ll probably disagree with you. But I’m all ears.
What we have in this thread, though, are people saying that it’s perfectly OK to call white people thugs (if they are in fact acting like “violent or brutish criminals or bullies”), and I presume also to call members of other ethnic or “racial” groups “thugs” (again, assuming they are in fact acting like “violent or brutish criminals or bullies”); but it’s not OK to call a black person a “thug”, even if he’s in the process of storming the U.S. Capitol in order to try to violently steal an election, or bashing in someone’s head in order to steal their wallet. This distinction seems weird to me, and arguably kind of racist.
And also just a trifle ridiculous. We wind up with a kind of Schrödinger’s racism: If we got a good description of the guy who hit poor Bob in the head in my earlier example, and the Bob-basher wasn’t a black person, then Alice isn’t being racist:
“Guys, did you hear about Bob? Some guy just walked up to him on the street, bashed him in the head, and stole his wallet and his phone! Now Bob’s in the hospital with a fractured skull! Bob did regain consciousness long enough to describe the guy; he was some kind of skinhead, sounded like a neo-Nazi type–man, I hate those alt-right thugs!”
And I guess if Bob didn’t get a good look at the guy, but the crime took place in Fargo, Alice probably isn’t being a racist; but if the crime took place in Detroit, Alice probably is being a racist, even if no one knows what the assailant looks like, and Alice isn’t actually making any assumptions about the assailant’s “race” at all, just his propensity for bashing in people’s skulls.
Right … will Merriam Webster help your REDACTED?
2 Black or less commonly black
a: of or relating to any of various population groups of especially African ancestry often considered as having dark pigmentation of the skin but in fact having a wide range of skin colors
NOTE: Capitalization of Black in this use is now widely established.b: of or relating to Black people and often especially to African American people or their culture
Black literature, Black college, Black pride, Black studiesNOTE: Capitalization of Black in this use is now widely established.
Black Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
Huh? Do you know what immutable means? Your political orientation is NOT an immutable or mostly immutable factor.
Thank you for not judging me! I used the word until… Maybe a year ago. My mental image is a burly white guy with tattoos who uses his brawn, not his brain.
Someone had to tell me. I learned about the change in meaning from discussions like this one. But i try to keep up with my mother tongue as it changes. So I’ve stopped calling anyone a “thug”, because i don’t like the connotations that word now carries. As others have said, there are plenty of other words in the language.