Thugs: Constructing Baltimore Rioters

A group of captured 19th-century Indian thugs

In the past few days, various public officials, like Baltimore’s mayor and President Obama, have been slammed for referring to rioters as ‘Thugs.’  The charge: ’Thug’ is now a dog-whistle term for unruly Black youths (or Black youths in general); even more, it’s a widely understood popular synonym for ‘nigg*r’ and thus is a racist slur.

Certainly, no sane person would accuse President Obama or Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of deliberately casting such blanket aspersions on African American young people.  No doubt, they — and many journalists — use the term as it has been used for the last 100+ years in American English, as a synonym for ‘gangster’ or for a general anti-social miscreant.  But there are more complex racial penumbra about the word ‘Thug’ than are usually acknowledged.

Alice the Goon, Thimble Theater,  by E. C. Seger, 1930s

In the first half of the 20th century, ‘Thug’ commonly referred to organized crime figures, mostly those of Italian origin.  A similar word was ‘Hooligan,’ originally referring to Irish delinquents.  Yet another was ‘Goon,’ originating in a 16th-century word for ‘simpleton’ but popularized in the United States as a scary Popeye cartoon character (Alice the Goon), whose amorality was connected to her unnatural gender traits.  In other words, in American English, terms that index dangerous criminality often have or have developed connections with various minority or non-dominant groups, a connection not lost on NFL star Richard Sherman when he was called a 'Thug.'

Is Richard Sherman a ‘Thug’?

Yesterday, The Atlantic published an article about the use of ‘Thug’ that attempted to do two things.  First, it explored the word’s origins in discourses about Indian criminality.  Second, it detailed its appropriation by rap and hip-hop culture as, roughly, a signifier of authentic street cool and credibility — rather like ‘gangsta’ a few years back (or, probably, ‘niggah” as a still-current term of brotherhood).

NWA album cover, 1988

Let’s take the second point first, because it’s not that difficult to unpack.  One way that African American culture, particularly its youth culture, has resisted majority disparagement is to resignify the very terms of disparagement (fellow theory heads: drag out your Henry Louis Gates and Homi Bhabha).  In the age of social media, such resignification can happen very quickly.  Not everyone outside urban youth culture can keep up with these shifts.  Thus Obama and Rawlings-Blake (plus many newspeople, black and white) can find themselves caught in a rhetorical minefield.  Which isn’t to say that overtly racist use of the term ‘Thug’ doesn’t happen (see Ted Nugent, for example), casting contemporary usage into even more volatile territory and suggesting that public figures would be well advised to avoid the term.

Street Art by Gangsy?

Back to the first point.  The Atlantic article accurately summarizes the subcontinental history of 'Thug.’  It’s the name of a brotherhood/caste/cult/guild of murderous thieves first recorded in the 14th century. The word has its origin in the Sanskrit for ‘deceiver,’ as the Thug’s modus operandi was to insert himself into a group of traveling merchants, then strangle the targets and steal their money and goods.  In the 19th century, the British overlords of India waged war on ‘Thuggee’ and pretty much eradicated it.  Thuggee’s exotic criminality inspired a small but influential 19th-century subgenre of ‘Thug literature,’ including Philip Meadows Taylors’s 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug (available for free on Kindle!) and sections of Following the Equator by Mark Twain.  Such works were the conduit through which ‘Thug’ entered the English language, to be subject to continual and varied decontextualization — one of the best known being Mola Ram, the ‘Thug’ villain in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Mola Ram (1984)

The Atlantic article does not investigate the reasons behind the British Imperial campaign against the Thugs.  Under William Sleeman, this campaign occurred in the years before the installation of the Raj, the complete British rule of India.  Part of Sleeman’s efforts no doubt was motivated by an imperial desire to impose law and order; part was to show why Indian peoples needed the strong civilizing hand of the British.  The more Indians could be shown as savage, amoral, idolatrous (Thugs were represented as worshippers of the bloodthirsty goddess Kali, even though many members of Thuggee were Muslim), the more British rule could be justified. In short, the demonization of the Thugs served British imperial interests.  It was not enough to identify them as robbers or killers; they had to be distinguished from garden-variety dacoits (brigands) by detailing secret signals, diabolical rites, hereditary bloodlines, even ritual drug use. There was no attempt to understand what may have made Thuggee seem a reasonable response to particular socio-economic-cultural conditions.

William Sleeman, Thug-Hunter

Segue to Baltimore, USA, 2015.  A big problem with using ‘Thugs’ to describe rioters, it seems to me, adheres in the term’s discursive history. When ‘Thugs’ are subject to ruling taxonomies,  they are reduced to quantifiable, potentially controllable entities — markers in an impartial knowledge system to be surveilled and contained (or, if necessary, destroyed) for the ‘greater good.’  This is what happened, more or less, in 19th-c. India. In a way, one could argue that this is what’s been attempted in the United States, vis-a-vis young black males.

It would be tedious to detail the homologies between 19th-century British reportage on Thuggee and 21st-century U.S. reportage on (African American even if no one says it outright) ‘Thugs,’ also parsed as ‘gang members’ (remember the ‘reports’ a couple of days ago that the Bloods and the Crips had banded together to kill police officers?).  Both Thugs and 'Thugs' have distinctive headwear (Thugs were believed to use their turbans/head scarves as garottes).  Both have initiation rituals, special vocabularies, and form a ‘secret’ brotherhood (Thugs could be born into the society or ‘recruited,’ and/or ‘apprenticed,’ usually when the would-be initiate was orphaned or abjectly impoverished).  Both ‘use drugs’ (Thugs were supposed to ingest gur [unrefined sugar, also known as jagaree, considered by Ayurvedic specialists as a useful stimulant and by British colonists as a craze-inducing intoxicant]).  

Thug encampment, 19th-century painting

The point?  Accusing a group of secrecy, covert messaging, bodily or vestimentary coding, and drug use — plus a malevolently anti-majority, anti-ruling class, anti-capital-controllers impulse  that easily translates into violence — is a time-honored way to simplify complex socio-cultural-economic interactions . . . and too often, to justify an agendum of oppression or, at best, neglect. Always, it allows erasure of very real grievances and inequities that may, in least in part, motivate and sustain such groups.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist.  I don’t believe that our President, or Maryland officials now or in the recent past, are trying to enact a capitalist-thug agendum by calling angry (and often thoughtlessly and destructively angry) young people ‘Thugs.’  Yet I do believe that the lexicological and political history of ‘Thug,’ and the way the word has been used ideologically and strategically, can shed some light on Baltimore 2015.  

References

Bhabha, Homi K.  The Location of Culture.  London:  Routledge, 1994.

Botelho, Greg.  “Don’t call him a ‘thug’ and 4 other things you should know about Richard Sherman.”  CNN News Online, 23 January 2014.  http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/22/us/5-things-richard-sherman/ 

Brinker, Luke. “Ted Nugent unloads on African-American “thugs” in horribly racist column about Ferguson.“ Salon, 2 October 2014.  http://www.salon.com/2014/10/02/ted_nugent_unloads_on_african_american_%E2%80%9Cthugs%E2%80%9D_in_horribly_racist_column_about_ferguson/

Fuerhard, Ben, and Bob Fredericks.  “Obama calls Baltimore rioters ‘criminals and thugs.”  New York Post, 28 April 2015.  http://nypost.com/2015/04/28/obama-calls-baltimore-rioters-criminals-and-thugs/

Garber, Megan. “The History of ‘Thug.’ The Atlantic, 28 April, 2015.  http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/thug/391682/

Gates, Henry Louis.  The Signifying Monkey.  Oxford:  Oxford UP: 1988.

Levs, Josh.  “After Baltimore riots, some leaders slam ‘thugs’ as the new n-word.” CNN News Online, 29 April 2015.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/29/us/baltimore-riots-thug-n-word/

Mahanandi.  “Jaggery (Gur, Bellam) — Sugarcane and Palm.”  Living in Consciousness, 26 November 2006.  http://www.nandyala.org/mahanandi/archives/2006/11/26/jaggery-gur-bellam-sugarcane-and-palm/

Roy, Parama.  “Discovering India, Imagining Thuggee.”  The Yale Journal of Criticism 9:1 (1996) pp. 121-145.

Sleeman, William Henry.  Ramasseana, or A vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the thugs.  Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1836.

Taylor, Phillip Michael.  Confessions of a Thug (1839).  Rupa Publications (electronic edition) , 2009.

Thornton, Edward.  Illustrations of the History and the Practice of the Thugs.  London: William H. Allen, 1837.

Twain, Mark.  Following the Equator.  American Publishing Company: 1897.

Wagner, Kim.  “The Deconstructed Stranglers:  A History of Thuggee.”  Modern Asian Studies 28:4 (October 2004) pp. 934-963.