Thug is sort of a racist slur. It comes from the Thugee sect of Hinduism that used to praise Kali by robbing and killing people as sort of a ritual.
So don’t refer to Hindus as thugs. That could be insulting.
Well that still has nothing to do with blacks, so it is not “racist” toward blacks. Anyway, the remote origins of a word do not determine its contemporary meaning. I’ll wager that not 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 people in the USA has any idea that the word “thug” has any association with a sect of Hinduism. When Americans today use the word it has no racial connotation whatsoever. I’m white and the only “thugs” with whom I have had personal conflict in my 5+ decades on the planet were also white. It never occured to me it could be associated only with blacks (or Hindus).
BTTT
Wrong race. It applies to Hindus (not a race), not blacks nor Mooselimbs (again, not a race).
But everyone knows what a thug is in 2016, and it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with undesirable.
The Hindus don’t own the word.
In America, thug means Michael Brown. When he roughed up the store clerk in the convenience store to get some Swisher sweets, it was no “ritual.”
When Brown went after Officer Wilson’s gun and was shot and killed in the process, it was no “ritual.”
Give me a *major* break!
A ‘thu’g is simply a violent out of control dude in this country. People want to make it about race because we are all PC nowadays. It isn’t. It’s certainly an insult, but not a racial insult. How many times have I heard, the GOP dismissively described as is just a bunch of ‘white guys’. If a guy dismissively said the Dems were just a bunch of minorities, I guess that gets you fired too. Trump is a bit over-the-top but, he’s sticking it to the PC culture....which I love.