No, Calling the Baltimore Rioters ‘Thugs’ Does Not Make You a Racist : Part two
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417787/no-calling-baltimore-rioters-thugs-does-not-make-you-racist-jonah-goldberg
Thug Strife I don’t get it. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big when all the executives are excited about the toy buildings that turn into robots. Hanks just doesn’t get it. He asks, “What’s fun about that?” Except I’m asking, “What’s racist about that?”
The mayor of Baltimore, who will spend the rest of her days living light-years from the word “Churchillian,” recently apologized for two gaffes. First, she walked back her statement that she gave rioters space to “destroy.” That’s not what she meant, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.
It sure sounded like it to me, and the facts on the ground seemed to line up with the rhetoric (this new video of Baltimore cops fleeing rioters is pretty compelling). But fair enough. People often say things clumsily in stressful situations. But then the mayor apologized for calling the destroyers “thugs.” “There are no thugs in Baltimore,” she added. “Sometimes my own little anger translator gets the best of me.”
Really, there are no thugs in Baltimore? It’s a thug-free zone?
A Thug by Another Name Still Stinks . . . Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were plenty of non-thug kids pretending to be thugs in the mobs in Baltimore. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City, I knew, or at least met, dozens of kids who said they were in gangs. The number who were actually in anything like an actual gang was much, much lower. Long before we hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction, young men were acting like they’re tougher than they really are. But here’s the thing. Someone torched those stores. Those looters weren’t holograms or masked Scooby Doo villains looking to get those good-but-meddling kids in trouble. At least one actual carbon-based life form is responsible for burning down a community center and apartment complex that was being built by the Southern Baptist Church for low-income old folks.
Now, if there’s some reason we can’t use the word thug to describe these people, I’m all ears. I’ve written about the etymology of “thug” many, many times and if the issue is lexicological exactitude, I’m up for that conversation.
Others argue that the word has now taken on too many racial connotations. Barret Holmes Pinter writes that “thug” is the new “ni**er.” Baltimore city councilman Carl Stokes bullied CNN’s Erin Burnett the other day. “These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No, we don’t have to call them thugs,” Stokes said. “Just call them ni**ers. Just call them ni**ers.”
First of all, it seems to me there’s no small amount of racial paranoia here. I use “thug” all of the time with no racial intent at all (I started calling Robert Gibbs a “thug-dufus” after I heard someone else use the phrase). At the dog park, my wife and I will sometimes call bullying dogs (including, alas, our own) “thugs.” One time when Zoë pinned a standard poodle on the ground, I grabbed her, and said, “Don’t be such a thug.” I’ll canvass for witnesses to be sure, but I don’t recall everyone in the park gasping in horror the way they would if I’d yelled at my dog: “don’t be such a ni**er.”
Pinter argues that the word was imposed on blacks and that Tupac Shakur and others boldly appropriated and embraced it. I’m not sure I buy the first part. It seems to me the term “thug” was mostly imposed on, you know, thugs. But the second part is pretty obviously true. After all, Shakur tattooed “thug life” across his stomach. Which, according to Pinter, he did for really complex reasons:
Tupac’s embracing of the word, in effect, said that black Americans have been unfairly called this word for far too long, and that now we need to start employing the word so that we can impact the discussion and the word’s usage. It is not a justification for non-black voices to refer to blacks as thugs, but rather the appropriation of insult as a mechanism for social discourse. Well, maybe.
Maybe there’s something to this “mechanism for social discourse” thing. Or maybe Tupak Shakur was part of a broad transracial fad in American popular culture to glamorize criminality. Whatever the case, I’m not an absolutist here. If it’s really true that a significant share of blacks hear “ni**er” when someone says “thug,” I’m totally open to the idea of using a different word.
But here’s the real problem, even after we expunge this now-hateful word: We will still need a negative word for people (of any race!) who riot, rob, torch and act like [insert non-racially loaded term to replace “thug” here].
I don’t want to be racist. So, please, give me the shaming word for people who behave horribly that lets me condemn the content of their character without referencing the color of their skin. You can be a transgender half-Hmong half-Swede in a pinstripe suit, an albino Norwegian in a Bentley, or a poor black kid from West Baltimore, but if you burn down a home for poor old people there still has to be some bad word available to us to describe you.
Excuses vs. Explanations Where is the acknowledgement that some of the so-called thugs aren’t so-called, they’re simply thugs? Pinter is outraged about the fact that some tough football players get called thugs. Okay that’s one conversation. But getting offended when gangsters who loot mom-and-pop stores are called thugs strikes me as a completely different conversation.
Before he insinuated that Burnett is a racist, Stokes waxed eloquent about how these kids have been marginalized, etc. Translation: The punks setting cars on fire and looting stores are the real victims. First of all, it’s not only plausible, but obviously true, that many of these punks had rough starts in life. Unlike the largely bogus claim that poverty and powerlessness is what creates terrorists, the root-causes argument has explanatory power for street criminals. No serious conservative disputes that poverty, joblessness, crime, family breakdown, crappy schools, etc. help explain why young men make bad choices. But explanations aren’t excuses, even if they overlap at the margins from time to time. Bad choices are still choices, and if we don’t judge people by their choices we can’t judge people at all.
If a sane man rapes and kills a little girl but, when caught, explains how terrible his own childhood was, the civilized response of the criminal justice system must be “we don’t care.” Some crimes are moral gray areas — the man who steals bread to feed his starving family, etc. But, other crimes aren’t. Nonetheless, a society that refuses to distinguish between people who behave criminally and people who don’t won’t be a society for very long. And by the way, how exactly it helps the black community to say that th*gs cannot be singled out from the rest of the black community completely mystifies me. I thought the antidote to racism was judging people individually, based upon their behavior. I don’t discriminate against people because of the color of their skin, but I will freely admit I discriminate against people who burn down senior centers. But that’s just me.
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