A tweet by Questlove, the drummer for The Roots.
In a press conference a couple of days after the 2014 Super Bowl, the Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, who had made rather obnoxiously boastful comments after the game, was asked if he was bothered by being repeatedly referred to as a “thug.” (The sports website Deadspin calculated that thug was uttered 625 times on American television the day following the Seahawks’ win.) Sherman, a Stanford University graduate, said he was,
because it seems like it’s an accepted way of calling somebody the N-word now. It’s like everybody else said the N-word and then they say “thug” and that’s fine. … What’s the definition of a thug? Really? Can a guy on a football field just talking to people [be a thug?] … There was a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey! (Laughter from the media) They just threw the puck aside and started fighting. I saw that and said, “Ah, man, I’m the thug? What’s going on here?” (More laughter from the media).
At this point, it seems unquestionable to me that Sherman was on the mark, as was the former CNN correspondent Soledad O’Brien, who echoed his point and his words recently on CNN’s “Reliable Sources”: “Thug is a proxy, it’s a word we use instead of the n-word.” She read on the air from a newspaper article about Ohio State University students who, after their school won the national football championship, set more than 90 fires. The article described them as “revelers.”
The topic came up on “Reliable Sources,” of course, because of recent events in Baltimore. In the days after the killing of Freddie Gray, individuals destroyed property, stole things from stores, set fires, and threw bricks and other dangerous objects at police officers. These people were commonly called “thugs” — and, it should be noted, not only by whites but by President Obama and by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore, who is African-American. Rawlings-Blake subsequently apologized for using the term, saying, “Sometimes my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”
The seeming ubiquity of the word prompted a spirited discussion (restricted access) among New York Times readers about its associations and implications, and numerous investigations, such as this one, into its history. Thug derives from a Hindi word referring to members of an Indian association of professional robbers and murderers who strangled their victims. The first English use cited by the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1810; less than 30 years later, Thomas Carlyle was using the term figuratively: “‘Glasgow Thuggery’, ‘Glasgow Thugs’; it is a witty nickname.” It subsequently became a common way to refer to violent ruffians. In the early 90s, the rapper Tupac Shakur popularized the expression “thug life.”
A lot of history, complexity, and ambivalence resides in thug, and I do not mean to suggest that it is primarily, or even usually, a straight-up dog-whistle code word. But as O’Brien and others have observed, it almost always seems to be used about African-American males, who are surely not the only people who engage in the sort of behavior the word connotes. That would seem to be reason enough to refrain from using it.
Rawlings-Blake’s reference to her own anger is to the point. When we are angry and frustrated — as she was, seeing her constituents engage in destructive acts that hurt their their neighborhoods, their city, and their cause — we want to lash out. Several months back, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer (African-American) was shot and killed at a video store, while buying a game to reward his 10-year-old son for good grades. Two African-American males were arrested and charged with the crime. A decent person of my acquaintance posted on Facebook a reference to “the Philly police office[r] slain by sub-human criminals.”
Anger again, and understandable. But name-calling isn’t really an adult form of discourse. It allows the sort of attitudes described by Sherman and O’Brien to creep into the equation, whether or not the speaker is conscious of that. It’s closely tied to demagoguery. It doesn’t help reach insight or resolution, or convince an opponent of one’s position. In fact, it tends to do the opposite.
So what word to use instead? Rioters has been similarly critiqued for being racially charged. But I don’t have a problem with it, so long as it’s used in reference to people who run roughshod and destroy things. And as long as it’s also used about rioters at Ohio State.