New APPS

20 responses to “What is a thug?”

1. 

   Charles Young

   January 21, 2014

   Mr Zirin of The Nation joins Ms Cole in hitting this one out of the park: http://www.thenation.com/blog/177992/richard-sherman-racial-coding-and-bombastic-brainiacs#.

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2. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 22, 2014

   Yes, “thug” is the new n-word. All Sherman is doing is giving a wrestling promo, and a pretty good one at that. And all Trayvon Martin (also called a “thug” ad nauseum on television) was walking home after purchasing some skittles.
   This kind of white people discourse about what makes for a good black person has a long history tied to excruciating economic oppression made possible by political exclusion and widespread terrorism.**
   And use of “thug” shows the extent to which the past isn’t even past.
   My first big battle with LSU was to get them to either remove the infamous “good darky” statue ( link here ) from the LSU Rural Life Museum or at the very least put a historical placard underneath it that explained why citizens of Natchitoches (rightfully) kept throwing it in the river in the 1960s. In 1974 LSU had covered over the original wording (“Erected by the city of Natchitoches in grateful recognition of the arduous and faithful services of the good darkies of Louisiana”) with “Donated to the Rural Life Museum by Mrs. Jo Bryan Ducournau.”
   After months of complaint nine years ago the LSU Rural Life Museum finally replaced this with a historical marker that tried to explain the history of the statue in a way that explained why some people found it offensive. But even this concession was bitter tasting, because the dismissive people in charge of the museum consistently refused my requests that they allow African-American history professors from LSU or Southern University on the board in charge of rewriting the plaque.*
   I wish I had kept up the fight, but it ate up about two months of time, resulted in a lot of people very mad at me (prior to tenure), and literally made me physically ill. They did change the plaque and people I trust who have the stomach to continue dealing with them tell me that what’s on there now isn’t offensive. I don’t know.
   [Notes:
   *Every year the LSU Rural Life Museum has an elaborate ceremony where they honor a donor or worker by making them the “honorary overseer,” e.g. here . This makes me die a little bit inside. The whole thing is a cheap holiday in other people’s misery, and I have no idea why LSU won’t make them come to Jesus or cut ties with them. At some point I’m going to try to get them to cut this out, but with the budget cuts it’s a huge fight just to get the toilets working around here. It really is.***
   **From the 1890s until the 1960s on average a black person was lynched every four days in the United States. These were such popular forms of entertainment that railroads would alter their schedules so that people could witness the public torture and murder, and then send postcards of the dead bodies to friends.
   ***It just now occurs to me that this is a pretty good way to control people. Make it such that people who might spend their time actually improving things have to spend a lot of it on really basic things like plumbing, and then they won’t ask where the money’s coming from**** and who is doing what with it. See the movie Brazil and also wonder why this might be why people always have this huge issue getting toilet paper in totalitarian countries.
   ****Given the “good darky” statue and the use of “overseer” as an honorific, at LSU, clearly from some people with problematic (at best) racial attitudes.
   To be fair, there are *a lot* of people fighting the good fight in every walk of life at LSU and Baton Rouge in general. In some future posting I’ll focus on the good that people are doing and the way good people have struggled successfully against the oppressive weight of history, and against those who still benefit from this weight.]

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3. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 22, 2014

   Sorry, I just realized that the above was a little bit opaque because of the tangents.
   LSU’s step-‘n-fetch-it “good darky” statue is a paradigm case of white people expecting black people to behave in ways that make them complicit in their own immiseration. For over seventy years in the vast majority of the American South, if you didn’t act exactly in the manner portrayed by the statue there was a non-trivial chance you would be publicly tortured to death.
   The current use of “thug” as an epithet cannot be divorced from this violent history of white people enforcing certain norms of behavior for black people, norms completely divorced form those they enforce for other white people.
   A picture of the statue is here .
   A picture of the recently added informational plaque is here . I can’t really make out exactly what it says.

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4. 

   Josh Shepherd

   January 22, 2014

   I saw some talk about how Sherman might have owed the reporter an apology, even if what he said about Crabtree was just excited talk (and not ‘graceless,’ or whatever). The thought appeared to be that this was a kind of middle position to take. But that just seems like another way to recycle the thug theme. He owed her an apology why? Because he was too loud? Too physically demonstrative in a space near her?
   Consensus amongst the talking heads now, after ‘reflection,’ seems to be that Sherman made a mistake in some vague sense – usually it is suggested that he ‘took attention away’ from his team. That’s garbage too: Seattle is Sherman and his attitude, and there’s a bunch of good reasons reporters were running to him after the game, and not to all the other people that now deserve attention (also, isn’t there enough attention to go around in the 24-hr sports news cycle?). Again, this seems (to me) like another way to recycle the thug theme, this time appealing hypocritically to ideals of sportsmanship.
   I’m in agreement with Eric and the blog post linked about the thug issue.

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5. 

   James Rocha

   January 22, 2014

   Jon: Apparently there are three plaques, and I find them to remain offensive, but in a much more complex fashion. They are clearly hiding behind a naive-relativism to say that “changing times” have made people think differently. It seems to end in this fashion: “Uncle Jack is still controversial today. Individual reactions vary: to some, it is an honor; to others, it’s demeaning; and still to others, it is fond reminiscences.” So, while some people may find it demeaning, we must remember that there are other people who find it an honor and others just fondly reminisce about the glorious days of racial segregation.
   Someone typed out the plaques here (I cannot read the pictures that well either): http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM7Z78_Good_Darky_Baton_Rouge_LA

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6. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 22, 2014

   It’s completely repulsive. Who writes this stuff? “dedicated to Blacks,” “A group of Blacks”. Not African Americans. Not black people. Just Blacks.
   They are not quoting other people talking this way, but engaging in it.
   Let’s go to the museum and make sure that the web site is correct, and if so go to Faculty Senate later this semester and make sure that at the very least LSU Faculty go on record completely distancing ourselves from the Rural Life Museum.

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7. 

   Eric Winsberg

   January 22, 2014

   “The thought appeared to be that this was a kind of middle position to take.”
   This highlights another stupid aspect of American journalism–even sports journalism, apparently. It should always take the “middle position”–no matter how misguided one side is.

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8. 

   Brannon McDaniel

   January 22, 2014

   I had no problem with anything Sherman said to Erin Andrews. If anything, I sympathized with Sherman when he got the mic shoved in his face so quickly after the game. Furthermore, it was refreshing to hear something that appeared to be completely unrehearsed*, as opposed to the usual post-game filler.
   My only complaint about his behavior was when he made physical contact with Crabtree (smacking him on the backside) immediately after making that tremendous defensive play, and then acting dumbfounded when Crabtree pushes his face away. In this particular situation, Sherman comes off like a jerk.
   *The emerging backstory with Sherman and Crabtree makes me wonder about exactly how unrehearsed his post game comments were.

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9. 

   Erin Tarver

   January 22, 2014

   I have a sneaking suspicion that the “thug” label in this context is being trotted out for sexist as well as racist reasons. The expectation that black men be deferential and “respectable” in just the right way is especially pronounced when white women are around, and the misogynist/racist drive to “protect our women” looms pretty large in the history of the criminalization, murder and torture of black men in the U.S. (who, in this narrative, are portrayed as both a sexual and physical threat). That Erin Andrews is the specific person interviewing Sherman seems relevant to the uproar around his comments. The pretty little white lady (who, by the way, as a woman, is relegated to asking the sideline “how did you FEEL?” questions that no one expects to generate any useful information) is suddenly juxtaposed with, you know, the emotions and discourse actually associated with football, coming from a man who is expected to watch himself around white women. I suspect that if a man had done the interview, Sherman might still have been called a thug (but I wonder if it would have been more along the lines of “classless” and that sort of thing), but he certainly would not have been called upon to apologize to the reporter.

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10. 

    Eric Winsberg

    January 22, 2014

    The “apologize to Andrews” claim is beyond absurd. And yes, I doubt anyone would be asking him to apologize to a man (though my own guess is this the only gendered part of this) If Andrews has journalistic integrity, she will disavow any expectation that he should apologize to her for candidly answering her question. What self-respecting journalist wants their source to apologize for not censoring him or herself?

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11. 

    John Protevi

    January 22, 2014

    A couple of points: Erin is right that (very often female) sideline reporters do the emotion question (“how do you fell now?”). But IIRC, she asked Sherman “what happened on that last play?”, which is a better question.
    On the question of taunting, yes, it was a taunt, but here’s a very good post by John Drabinski on how we can’t hear Crabtree’s rightful complaint about the taunt: http://jdrabinski.com/?p=237#comment-36
    Finally, on taunting versus the wonderful art form of trash talking (or braggadocio, if you want a fancy term — and check out the Iliad if you want to hear some great trash talking), taunting actually works against bragging on how great you are, because all you’ve done, by your own admission, is beat someone mediocre. What you should be bragging about is how great you are to have beaten such an amazingly good opponent.

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12. 

    Eric Winsberg

    January 22, 2014

    She says “the final play, take me through it.” I think that’s specifically ambiguous as to whether he’s supposed to say what happened or what he was thinking as it happened.
    And yes, one funny thing about Sherman is that he wants to brag AND trashtalk. “I’m the greatest… He’s a sorry excuse for a receiver.” Of course, if Sherman were that great AND Crabtree were that “sorry,” Sherman wouldn’t have had to make such an acrobatic play at the end. But we digress….

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13. 

    John Protevi

    January 22, 2014

    Hi Eric, thanks for the precision on the question asked.
    To stay with the digression just a little longer, I would equate bragging and trash-talking and distinguish them as self-aggrandizement from taunting qua belittling your opponent.

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14. 

    Erin Tarver

    January 22, 2014

    I should clarify that my claim about gender here isn’t just confined to Andrews. Sherman’s gender matters quite a bit; my suggestion is that his being a black man is specifically relevant to his being perceived as threatening and/or criminal–which is what I take the “thug” language to be evoking. The presence of Andrews may or may not exacerbate the perception of that threat for some audiences (though, again, knowing the history of lynchings and the place of white femininity in the portrayal of black men as threatening, it is hard for me to think it doesn’t). But even if it doesn’t, that wouldn’t mean that gender in this discussion is confined to the question about whether Sherman should apologize to Andrews. “Thug” is, I think, a largely gendered word, in addition to being racialized. How often, for example, are black women referred to as thugs in the popular media? When people used racially coded language in reference to black women, is “thug” invoked, or something else? Are black women perceived as threatening/criminal in the same way as black men? I think that if we take the sociological and philosophical work done by black feminists (among other folks) seriously, we have to say no.
    I guess all of this is to say that I absolutely agree that “thug” is generally used as a racist term. But I wouldn’t call it the new N-word, because it’s reserved almost exclusively for black men, whose racialized and gendered status is perceived as threatening. That is not, by the way, to suggest that it is somehow less offensive. It’s just to suggest that there’s a specifically gendered dimension to the word that needs to be unpacked.

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15. 

    Anonymous

    January 22, 2014

    Sherman himself addresses the “thug” epithet here. He remarks: “The only reason it bothers me is because it seems like it’s the accepted way of calling somebody the N-word nowadays. Because they know.”

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16. 

    Eric Winsberg

    January 22, 2014

    Anonymous: That’s a great interview. Thanks for posting.
    Erin: Yes. I should have clarified that only the apology part is gendered with respect to Andrews. The word “thug” itself is thoroughly masculine. But its not gendered in the sense that all white people “should be afraid” of thugs. Not just white women.
    John: I think of trash talk as both bragging and denigrating your opponent. Muhammad Ali was the ultimate trash talker (maybe its inventor?) and he did both. But he was too smart to call his opponents bad boxers. That motivates them and diminishes your own accomplishment when you beat them. He called them “too ugly to be champion” “a big ugly bear” ” a gorilla” “stupid” etc. but not usually bad boxers.

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17. 

    Eric Winsberg

    January 22, 2014

    And speaking of:
    —I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me—black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.–Muhammad Ali

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18. 

    Anonymous

    January 22, 2014

    In British English, at least, ‘thug’ is much more to do with class than race.
    Consider the following common comparison between [Association] Football and Rugby:
    Football is a gentleman’s game played by thugs. Rugby is a thugs game played by gentlemen.
    One might argue that class is the relevant category in the US too, it’s just that class is much more complex there.

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19. 

    anonymous socal

    January 22, 2014

    For what it is worth, in addition to all of the vile responses to Sherman, I’ve been pleased to see at least some (and maybe lots of) people react to his interview with Andrews, to his other interviews, and the rest of it by being quite impressed by him — as someone driven, intelligent, and successful who plays a very competitive, very emotional game, and who expressed a totally reasonable and understandable emotion after a critical play.
    I’m guessing the guy actually picks up more than a few fans, even outside of Seattle, over this business. And that’s a good thing.

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20. 

    GFA

    January 23, 2014

    http://caecusrex.wordpress.com/2012/11/01/thug-life/

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