Yahoo News stoking the fire on the non-story that won’t go away:

NEW YORK - Four days after the city’s transit strike ended, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was still coming under fire for his use of the word “thuggishly” to describe the actions of the leaders of a union that is mostly minority.

“Michael Bloomberg, don’t be nasty and mean,” attorney Norman Siegel said Monday, standing on the steps of City Hall. “Be positive. Together, we can improve race relations in New York.”

The civil rights attorney noted that more than 70 percent of the Transport Workers Union’s 33,000 members are “of color.” And while he didn’t believe Bloomberg’s use of the word was in itself racist, Siegel said, “The perception out there is that it is racist. And the reaction has enormous racial overtones.”

Bloomberg used the word Dec. 20 during a briefing on the first day of the three-day strike that forced millions of riders to spend extra hours commuting. The mayor complained that union leaders had “thuggishly turned their backs on New York City and disgraced the noble concept of public service.”

Some criticized him for using the word, saying it was racist in the context of a mostly minority union. A Bloomberg spokesman said it was wrong to bring race into the situation.

Using the word thugs is now racist. Apparently, you can only be a thug if you’re black. You know, kinda like a nigger. I mean, nigger and thug mean the same thing, right?

Sometimes I wonder how we’re ever going to advance as a society when we can’t even say a word.

thug: Pronunciation Key (thg) n.

1. A cutthroat or ruffian; a hoodlum.
2. also Thug One of a band of professional assassins formerly active in northern India who worshiped Kali and offered their victims to her.

Funny how there’s no mention of the term, “derogatory slang for black people.”

Honestly, I think people are just dying to find something to pin on the mayor at this point. Since they can’t pin the “doesn’t care about black neighborhoods” thing on him, and they can’t pin the elitist rich man tag on him, they’ll just try to pin the racist thing on him because he dared use the word thug to describe the workers who walked off the job stranding 7 million commuters.

Oddly enough, black people, who seem so offended by the word thug, have embraced the word as their own, much in the same way they’ve embraced the word nigger, however co-opting a word doesn’t change its definition to exclusively mean “you.” Italians have been called “thugs” for years. So were the early Irish arrivals in New York City (way back in the oldern days when Irish Catholics were considered the scum of the earth), the Chinese gangs that run Chinatown, and even folks like the Latin Kings and their ilk.

“Thug” is not a replacement term for the word “nigger,” and is not a racist word.

Besides, I can think of some much more colorful words for the folks who walked:

scumbags
assholes
douchebags
cocksuckers
scumbags
motherfuckers
punks
bitches
hoes
morons
fuckers
assbags
asscunts
cowards
dumbasses

and the list goes on…

…And for the record, none of that is meant in a racially derogatory way.

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