In a perfect case of missing the big picture, some liberal politicians, activists, and commenters are failing to decry the civic self-destruction of Baltimore’s rioters. Instead, they are slamming the critics of those who looted, vandalized, and incinerated their own city. No fewer than 144 automobiles were torched in Charm City. According to Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan, at least 200 businesses were destroyed — many of them small and owned by hard-working black entrepreneurs. The local outlets of major national retailers, most notoriously a CVS pharmacy, had their shelves cleared by transaction-resistant shoppers, burned to the ground, or both. This sent similar corporations a sad and unambiguous signal: Stay out of the ’hood.
Rather than excoriate these criminals, prominent liberals point their fingers at those who point their fingers at these hoodlums. The real bad guys, according to these leftists, are those who call the looters and rioters “thugs.”
When CNN’s Erin Burnett described the lawbreakers as “thugs,” Baltimore City Council member Carl Stokes would have none of it.
“Just call them n****rs,” Stokes shouted at Burnett. “Just call them n****rs. No, we don’t have to call them by names such as that.”
Some on the Left have slammed none other than Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and even Obama for calling these hooligans “thugs.”
As Mayor Rawlings-Blake argued on April 27, “Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down.”
Obama told journalists the next day about the need “to clean up in the aftermath after a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place.”
As the Washington Times reported, this was just too much for Empowerment Temple AME Church pastor Jamal Bryant, who eulogized Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old reported drug dealer whose death in police custody triggered days of unrest. Referring to Obama and Rawlings-Blake, the Baltimore preacher told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly, “They have committed black-on-black crime by using that word against people who look just like them.”
The White House doubled down on “thugs.”
“When you’re looting up a convenience store or you’re throwing a cinder block at a police officer, you’re engaging in thuggish behavior, and that’s why the president used that word,” Obama’s spokesman Josh Earnest declared. “Whether it’s arson or the looting of a liquor store, those were thuggish acts.”
If “thug” really is an anti-black epithet, black liberals and their allies should sit down with top Democrats and ask them why they so often use this word — particularly and puzzlingly in reference to non-blacks.
For her part, Mayor Rawlings-Blake sounded chastened by these detractors. By last Wednesday, she sang a more conciliatory tune to those who had demolished her city, assaulted her citizens, and incinerated much of her tax base.
“I wanted to clarify my comments on ‘thugs,’” she began. “When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a way that you don’t mean. That night, we saw misguided young people who need to be held accountable, but who also need support. And my comments then didn’t convey that.”
From thugs to misguided young people, in just two days. What a journey. The Atlantic’s Meghan Garber took a long, almost-academic look at “The History of ‘Thug,’” as she titled her essay last week. She, too, spurns this word.
“The term has been flung about by commenters both professional and non-, mostly as a way of delegitimizing the people who are doing the protesting and rioting,” Garber wrote. “To dismiss someone as a ‘thug’ is also to dismiss his or her claims to outrage.”
No.
Agree or disagree with their views, peaceful protesters need not and should not be delegitimized. As for dismissing the claims of rioters, damn right!
Everyone should dismiss their claims to throw rocks at cops, rob merchandise, and cremate a drug store filled with life-saving pharmaceuticals. Those who do such things are thugs.
Rather than being the new N-word, the T-word is an old term from far, far away. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says “thug” simply means “a violent criminal,” with no reference to race. However, “thug” derives from the Hindi word thag. This described a band of ruffians who robbed and fatally strangled their victims, often travelers. Mark Twain called them a “desolating scourge.” These brigands were wiped out in the 19th century, during the British Raj.
Since then, blacks have embraced this supposedly racist term.
The late rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur had the words “thug life” tattooed across his belly. Presumably, this made him — at once — a perpetrator and a victim of black-on-black crime.
Thug Kitchen offers recipes, merchandise, and even a cookbook. This enterprise does not exactly scream suburbs. “Eat some Goddamn vegetables,” its Amazon page advises. “Sign the f*** up,” its website beckons.
And if “thug” really is an anti-black epithet, black liberals and their allies should sit down with top Democrats and ask them why they so often use this word — particularly and puzzlingly in reference to non-blacks.
‐“I’m looking forward to the chance to talk to the president-elect of Ukraine tomorrow,” Obama said last June 3, while visiting Eastern Europe. “We can’t have a bunch of masked thugs creating chaos in a big chunk of Ukraine,” he added.
‐“There are strong forces that oppose workers being organized,” then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton explained at a May 6, 2012, town-hall meeting in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “You go back to the 19th and the early 20th century when labor unions were just getting started, there were goons, there were thugs, there were killings, there were riots, there were terrible conditions.”
‐During an April 27, 2012, State Department Holocaust commemoration, Clinton noted that the (openly white) Nazis occupied Hungary in March 1944. She added: “In the course of a few months, almost 500,000 of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz or shot by roving bands of fascist thugs.”
‐As I recalled Saturday on Fox and Friends, Hillary Clinton spoke about conditions in Libya on February 28, 2011. She lamented that “mercenaries and thugs have been turned loose to attack demonstrators.”
‐Speaking at Washington’s Four Seasons Hotel, Secretary of State John Kerry last November 17 remarked that ISIS’s “identity as a band of murderous thugs should be plain to everyone.”
‐“Ukrainians took to the streets in order to stand peacefully against tyranny and to demand democracy,” Kerry said in Kiev on March 4, 2014. “But what they stood for so bravely, I say with full conviction, will never be stolen by bullets or by invasions. It cannot be silenced by thugs from rooftops.”
‐Addressing conditions in Venezuela, then–House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said on September 17, 2004, “Hugo Chávez fancies himself a modern-day Simon Bolivar, but all he is is an everyday thug.”
‐ “The longer that Assad and his thugs are allowed to brutally murder the Syrian people,” then–White House press secretary Jay Carney said on May 31, 2012, “the more likely it becomes a sectarian civil war.”
‐Referring to Syria on May 29, Carney stated that “the international community is united in its revulsion at the regime’s actions through both its military and its thug forces.”
‐After the death of terrorist Baitullah Mehsud, then–White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called him “an individual whose title as a murderous thug was well deserved.”
The worst thing about the Left’s newfound “thug”-o-phobia is that it aims to strip these horrible black criminals of culpability for their misdeeds. Remember, these acts hurt law-abiding black people. Liberals, especially black ones, seem incapable of criticizing blacks who deserve criticism. The black folks who burned down Baltimore have not earned mere criticism. They should be denounced, vilified, and jailed. Attacking those who call them “thugs” works 180 degrees at cross purposes with what needs to be done.