Not a riot
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Minneapolis Seethes Over George Floyd's Death As Trump Calls Protesters 'THUGS'...
President Trump, who called Floyd's death "very sad and tragic" earlier this week, said early Friday that he had told Minnesota's governor that "the Military is with him all the way."
He also described the source of the unrest as "THUGS" — a word widely criticized for bearing racial overtones.
And this is CNN:
condemned the "criminals and thugs who tore up" the city
And the White House doubled down on the term afterward
"Whether it's arson or, you know, the looting of a liquor store ... those were thuggish acts,"
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@LuFins-Dad said in Not a riot:
@George-K When did the term thugs become racist? If anything, I visualize big. hulking white guys, probably Italian. Nothing racist...
No, those are wise guys.
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Seriously? It was originally a racist term, but had nothing to do with African Americans but Indians. Thugs were members of the Indian Murder/Robbery Cult in India. Over time, though, it came to mean any brutish and hulking criminal.
At some point, the rap culture started adopting the word in a slightly different context.
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Hooligan is derived from Hoolihan, a well known Irish surname. Saynomore.
Vandals - well, I think we all know where they came from. Bloody Jerry's at it again.
The best they could come up with to insult my national group was something involving citrus fruit, presumably because we'd been Yanking their chain and they just bally well got tired of it, dontyaknow!
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The notion that this only happens to people of a certain color and when the cop is of a certain color is one of the great non-sequiturs of our society. And none of our most important pop culture influencers are interested in thinking too critically about that aspect of it. But the fact is that it is perfectly plausible that this would have happened had Mr Floyd had white skin. And it is beyond plausible, certain even, that a video of such an incident would not have been seen or discussed by anybody.
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Meanwhile, all of our most virtuous messaging of the pop culture elite like Mr Obama, continues to cement the notion in everybody's heads that we have a permanent victim culture in America. And none of our most virtuous folk are particularly interested in doing any hard thinking about what exactly that idea does to people who are born into it.