Gabriel Ware has never been called a thug, but he’s pretty sure that if he met a fate like Trayvon Martin’s or Freddie Gray’s, many people would label him one, including people in the media.
“I guarantee they would, even though I don’t have a criminal record,” said the licensed master barber, who works in a shop in Midtown. “They will probably make up a reason.”
Morehouse College junior Tre Mason assumes that many people already attach the term to him. “As a student at (a historically black college), we are taught that we will always be perceived as a thug until we prove otherwise,” he said. “And sometimes still after the fact.”
Such fears may be completely grounded in reality, or they may not. But these days, with the term “thug” and the debate over its proper use ricocheting around the national head-space, it’s become a sore spot for countless African-Americans in metro Atlanta.
“I have a child who is nine,” said historian Karcheik Sims-Alvarado. “During his young lifetime, he learned of the death of Trayvon Martin and all the others at the hands of police officers. I am concerned about his well-being and safety, but I am more concerned about how he sees the world and how the world sees him.”
“Thug,” a word with roots in India seven centuries ago, was adopted in the 1990s by gangsta rappers. More recently, it’s become a favorite of conservative commentators decrying what they see as a degenerate element in black neighborhoods.
Many African-Americans say it’s become a polite substitute for the N-word, often applied to black men based on their style or demeanor rather than their actions.
So there was great consternation when it was used in connection with protests that turned violent in Baltimore, first by the city's mayor and then by President Obama. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake later retracted her comments; Obama did not.
Baltimore City Councilman Carl Stokes, asked repeatedly by a CNN reporter why "thug" wasn't the appropriate term to describe the protesters who vandalized property, finally snapped.
“Just call them (the N-word). Just call them (the N-word),” Stokes retorted.
Illya Davis, a philosophy professor at Morehouse and at Clark Atlanta University, said the sudden blanket use of thug conveys the dismissiveness and distaste inherent in obvious racial slurs.
“It seems almost that people with a certain disdain can get across a sentiment to us,” Davis said. “They can get away with saying thug under the guise that it is the closest they can get without aborting their social status.”
In the National Review, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg rejected that view. He defended the use of the word "thug" to describe looters in Baltimore after first acknowledging that many young men who affect a gangsta toughness are nothing of the sort.
“But here’s the thing,” Goldberg continued. “Someone torched those stores. … 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.”
The etymology of “thug” dates back to 14th century India, where “thuggee” or “tuggee” was coined to describe gangs of professional thieves and assassins. Historians say thugs may have murdered more than a million people over the course of several centuries.
Atlanta poet and activist Hank Stewart said the word should be color-blind.
“The people who hijacked Wall Street are thugs,” he said. “A thug is someone who has taken things without asking.”
But over the past 20 years, the word has been adopted and given a specific context if not a new meaning by some American rappers.
Famously, Tupac Shakur not only sang and rapped about the "Thug Life," he had the phrase tattooed across his torso as an unapologetic statement of who he was. Two days after Shakur was murdered in 1996, poet and scholar Nikki Giovanni had "Thug Life," permanently etched onto her left arm.
“I am a thug,” Giovanni said this week. “I could have put ‘poet’ … on my arm. But I wanted the kids to know that I respect them.”
The website Genius, which annotates rap lyrics, lists more than 11,000 uses of the word thug in its database. There are 19 musical artists, including Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Atlanta's Young Thug, who use the word in their name. The Atlanta-based rap duo Ying Yang Twins put out an album titled "Thug Walkin.'"
Lecia Brooks, director of outreach for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that Shakur used the term to decribe a life hemmed in by social barriers, trapped in a dead-end neighborhood where options were few to none.
“Tupac said: ‘I didn’t choose the thug life, it chose me,’” she said.
His response wasn’t casual, merely a matter of tone or style, she said. He was announcing: “I’m just gonna claim all this negativity you put on me and go with it.” To be a thug in that sense, she said, “you really have to have a heart for it.”
When whites apply it broadly to black men they disapprove of, she said, “they have no idea what they’re saying.”
Ware, the barber, said he was first jarred by the widespread use of the term during the Trayvon Martin case.
“Trayvon was an ordinary, average teenager, but when the George Zimmerman trial kicked off, people started referring to him as a thug,” Ware said. “And I am thinking, this kid is not a thug. He is a typical teenager.”
All-Pro defensive back Richard Sherman got called "thug" a lot after an on-air rant following his game-winning defensive stand in a 2013 Seattle Seahawks playoff victory. The Stanford University honors graduate, who has no criminal record, said the label bothered him.
“Because it seems like it’s an accepted way of calling somebody the N-word now,” Sherman said. “What’s the definition of a thug? Really? Can a guy on a football field just talking to people be a thug?”
In Sherman’s case, Brooks said, “it was as if his defiance, along with his blackness, identified him as some kind of thug.” She hears that same subtext a lot these days. Spoken critically by whites, she said, “it’s absolutely clear that they are talking about a black man who presents himself in a particular way.”
Lexicographer Kory Stamper said that in the 1900s, “thug” meant “someone who was a habitual criminal,” and by the 1930s, with the advent of organized crime, the word began to mean “gangster.”
But it has also long-been associated with political activism.
“What’s surprising is that the word “thug” has been used to smear protesters of one sort or another since the late 1800s — unionizers, civil-rights protesters, anti-war protesters, anti-nuclear and environmentalist protesters, political protesters, and so on,” said Stamper, associate editor at Merriam-Webster.
Obama's use of the word is not new, as he has used it to describe terrorists. He is not even the first president to use it regularly; FDR often referred to Nazis as thugs. Over the past year, Stamper said lexicographers at Merriam-Webster.com have noticed a broad use of the word, from "eco-punk thugs," to "GOP thugs," to "Russian thugs." She said newspaper crime blotters also commonly use the word.
Stamper said the word “thug” began to spike on Merriam-Webster.com on April 28, the day Obama used it, as a “top lookup,” meaning that it got “tens of thousands of lookups.”
Simlarly, searches for “thug” using Google showed a spike at the end of April. So did use of the word across a host of platforms, from Twitter to social media to TV, according to an analysis for the AJC by the market research firm iQ Media.
As for whether “thug” is the new N-word, opinion differs, even among African-Americans.
Thomas Smith, 25, said he’s not offended by it. “It is just a regular word that people use every day.”
His buddy Ryan Adams, 26, said that used as Obama and Rawlings-Blake did, it seems appropriate. “It doesn’t really offend me. I figure if you put yourself in bad situations, bad things can happen.”
Giovanni, a professor of literature at Virginia Tech, doesn’t regard it as tantamount to the N-word, but she said it does telegraph whites’ subliminal racial fears.
“It is the same thing as when (black men) were ‘rapists,’’’ she said, adding that post-slavery, one of whites’ biggest fears about black men was that they would rape white women. “That is what thug is taking the place of.”
Morehouse graduate Joel Alvarado said it’s very much a racial code word, used to belittle people who are fighting for social justice. “If they say ‘thug’ or ‘hood’ or ‘animal’ or ‘beast’ or ‘idiot’ or ‘welfare queen,’ you know what they trying to say,” he said. “They trying to objectify you and make you feel like you less than you really are.
“To call me a thug is to take away my humanity. Let me let you know that I am not a thug.”
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