‘Thug’ is a problem word — even if it didn’t used to be
The word "thug," which was once merely a synonym for goon, violent hooligan, ruffian has evolved into a coded racial slur in some instances.
The recent dust-up on social media over WGN-TV sports anchor Dan Roan’s use of the word “thug” to describe a Black basketball player is yet another cautionary tale illustrating that what you intend to say isn’t always what others hear.
“Bad news from Champaign on Ayo Donsunmu,” Roan tweeted after the University of Illinois’ Feb. 23 loss to Michigan State University. The now-deleted tweet, first reported on Robert Feder’s media blog, went on: “Nose broken by Spartan thug on Tuesday ... no word on how long he’ll be out.”
The reference was to a collision between Illini superstar Donsunmu and MSU center Mady Sissoko as Donsunmu was driving to the basket. After Donsunmu lost control of the ball, Sissoko administered a hard blow to Donsunmu’s face for which he was ejected from the game.
It was a violent, unsportsmanlike act, the sort of cheap shot you’d expect in hockey. There was a time when describing Sissoko in that moment as a “thug” — from a Hindi word for bandit that became an all-purpose English synonym for hooligan — would have gone unnoticed.
That time has passed. The word now “carries a coded, alternate meaning of ‘Black person behaving badly,’” as Columbia University linguist John McWhorter has written. It’s become a “salty but suitable way of saying, ‘There one of them goes again.’” McWhorter, who is Black, told NPR that he considers “thug” to be “a nominally polite way of using the N-word.”
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The ‘word' is not the problem.
Here we have a depiction of 'freedom fighters' exercising their Constitutional rights.
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That’s not always the case, of course.
In the news archives I find the term applied to Rod Blagojevich, Michael Madigan, Saddam Hussein, supporters of Mussolini, Hitler’s brownshirts, the Republicans who protested the vote recount in Florida in 2000, brutal police officers, white schoolyard bullies in rural Iowa, Donald Trump and the leaders of modern-day China. And that’s just under my byline.
Elsewhere, President Joe Biden was referring to a nearly all-white crowd when he recently blasted “the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.”
So when Roan deleted the offending post and served up an apology tweet that in part said he was “not aware in any way that the word had any racial connotation to it,” I believed him, especially given his long-standing reputation as a class act.
And also given the number of “since when is ‘thug’ a problem?” responses from Roan’s supporters on social media, whose bafflement seemed sincere.
Further, there’s my own track record. Along with all the references above in my clip file are numerous examples up until 2015 of me deploying the word to refer directly or indirectly to Black or presumptively Black criminals. I began to change my ways only after the controversy over President Barack Obama’s unapologetic but controversial use of “thugs” to describe those who destroyed property in Baltimore after the funeral of Freddie Gray, an African American man who suffered fatal injuries while in police custody. I even slipped up a few months later in writing about an old murder case.
The Twitter language police wasn’t yet on duty to slam me as a racist and call for my head as some word vigilantes did in Roan’s case last week, but my mea culpa would have echoed his: “That’s not me, never has been.”
You can complain that “thug” has evolved without your consent from a race-neutral equivalent to “ruffian” into a potentially toxic term. You can note that this evolution is due in part to its embrace by such Black rappers as Tupac Shakur, who glamorized the term “thug life” and gave it a layered meaning depending on who is using it.
But you can no longer say you didn’t know “thug” has entered the linguistic realm of “problematic,” still short of “impermissible” but a word to use at your own risk.
And you can’t now say you haven’t been put on notice.
Email this imbecile and tell him what you think.
