Maybe more and more people are meaning "thug" to be associated with black people, and it is one of those words like "gay" that we will just have to resign ourselves to mentally adjust. As someone in my 40s, when I hear the word thug, I picture the dudes a gangster sends out to break people's legs, and those dudes are always white in the movies. (side note, I hope gangster is at least still unclouded by new meanings, because "gangsta" is modified enough to tell the difference) Having said that, I do agree that it is inappropriate to call them thugs in this context, using my old-fashioned meaning for it. Thugs usually have an unemotional criminal intent with their violence.
Larry Wilmore's take: http://digg.com/video/larry-wilmore...able-media-coverage-of-the-baltimore-protests My sister and I had this discussion: why is the black community in such solidarity about this death? That's definitely a good thing, but if this kid was white, I would assume his family would sue the police department and justice would be served. Why does the community band together over this? I find it hard to believe, in 2015, that the assumption being made is that all the rioters are black and these riots are a way of expressing racial discontent. It's just a ridiculous supposition.
I guess it's easier to get hung up on meaningless semantics then to confront the actual problem. Who gives a shit if they're called a thug or not? How about people don't fucking riot and this won't be an issue? If the kid was killed (read: brutally murdered), then justice needs to be served, but not by roving gangs. That cop that shot a guy in the back in South Carolina? Fired and charged with aggravated murder right away. And hey, we didn't even have to have a national debate on what terms were appropriate.
Don't have time to answer fully. But the reason he got charged is because there was a video of him attempting to plant evidence on the guy who he arrested after shooting in the back six times. If it wasn't on video the presumption based on recent history is that he would have gotten off and it's pretty hard to argue against that.
I still think he would have been charged, maybe not that day but eventually. Surprisingly SC is good about dealing with this sort of thing.
South Carolina and Dallas lately have stood out as the two places in America where murderous and crooked cops are dealt with properly. They could write Cleveland, St. Louis and the NYPD a clinic on the right way to do things. A crime is a crime is a crime, and a badge doesn't excuse it.
Oh my god, of course it's a racial thing. It's awfully convenient to say "some people have it better than others," as though it's random chance and nothing more than the fickle machinations of an indifferent universe. The reality is anything but that. Slavery might have ended 150 years ago, but the century and a half that followed saw the deliberate and legislated transfer of wealth out of black communities and into white ones. It saw housing laws that redefined the American community. It saw a concerted, *government-led* effort to restrict educational access to people that are quite literally still alive. Other groups have struggled to be sure, but not one of them has faced the same systemic oppression that the descendants of slaves did, even setting aside whatever lingering biases have been inherited over the generations. So what, right? This is the land of opportunity, ain't it? Grease up those boot straps and get to pullin, son, nothing comes free in this lifetime, that's just a hard fact. Well, here's another hard fact: Success, in many ways, is a zero sum game. You want to compete with somebody born with a series of built in advantages, you have to be that much better. You have to be that much smarter. You have to navigate that tightrope so precisely that any mistake will find your bodies stacked below with those that happened to flinch. Sure some people can manage that. But when you compare large scale communities, those that aren't running with weights on are always going to go faster, and farther. Until you address the symptomatic issues that lead to the imbalances, the practical results is going to be a racially tiered society. There is an almost breathtaking arrogance to the suggestion that there is nothing racial about police bias, because it essentially always comes from people that aren't on the receiving end of it. PS -- Call people thugs all you like, just know that you're in exact lockstep with every dog-whistle racist that uses the word in public because they ain't allowed to call them niggers anymore.
Fuck Off Nom. Black mayor, black police chief, and no evidence AT ALL that this particular death was racially motivated.
So how about instead of thugs we call them misguided youth? Or does that imply that we're calling them misguided because they are not white. Maybe we can call them intimating looking people on an urban setting? Or does intimidating insinuate some sort of racial bias that implies the person saying that thinks black people are intimidating? How about young people? Or does that imply a bias against young people and older folks unfairly stereotype those younger than them. Maybe we can call them people, or does people insinuate that we're afraid of describing someone by their ethnicity and that therefore means we're closet racists? At a certain point, people powerplay words to reinforce their view of a situation. For fucks sake, Obama used the word. Is he racist? Or is his pandering to whitey? I'm sorry but people who try to spin the word thug are looking for something to get angry about. Get angry about police brutality, get angry about disadvantaged urban communities, but trying to find new words to ban and police is getting old.
You want to know what really weakens any effort to resolve racial problems? Playing 6-degrees-of-separation with every event trying to tie it to racial issues. And this is why I don't ever want to talk racial issues on this site ever again... because we can't seem to have any reasonable, rational discussion without the full-on victim/race card being played in every fucking situation... without even the benefit of the doubt. Thread closed.