Did Mike Brown deserve to die?

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Looking it up, I'd more chalk it up to serial killers being hard to catch in addition to police putting less emphasis on prostitutes and the homeless (meaning, class over race). I'm sure if it was wealthy black women getting knocked off, they'd be quite focused.

Serial killers rarely - if ever - go after the wealthy of any color. Instead, for the most part they kill marginalized people. But even with white serial killers killing white prostitutes, the police eventually catch most of them. Not so for black serial killers, as they hunted within their own groups for victims who doubly lack status, being black and hookers. Far more white serial killers had been arrested and convicted for such crimes, while their black counterparts went largely unnoticed for years and years, giving rise to the mistaken assumption that only whites were serial killers. No, it's just that nobody cared about the victims in black neighborhoods.

Of course, that makes sense.

Was this decades ago or more recent?

I believe it was in just the last few years, when the Grim Sleeper (called as such because he had apparently stopped killing for years, then started up again, much like the BTK Killer) was finally caught, revealing that he was a black man, and that he had racked up quite a high body count that no one had connected to just one killer prior to that. There have been others, as well.
Goes to show you, human monsters come in all colors.

Yes, I agree. The word "thug" is a racist dogwhistle. I never hear that word used to describe white criminals. No one ever calls James Holmes or Adam Lanza a thug.

"Terrorist" is another racist codeword that gets misused. Nobody ever calls the CIA terrorists, even though they're the group most other terrorists learned the ropes from.

Lanza and Holmes were spree killers, which has its own terms.

"Thug", whilst meaning "violent criminal", tends to be used on street and organized criminals. Caucasoid dudes working the streets are referred to as thugs, for example.

it is also a dog whistle reference to their skin colour.

I agree with your point about serial killers. But I still think it is more common for white men to be serial killers than any other group. I don't agree that white serial killers only attack white prostitutes. They will attack any prostitute because they figure they will not be caught because that prostitute is probably somebody that nobody cares about. I also agree that class is more important than race when it comes to this issue. I would bet anything that if the police shot an unarmed black man and that unarmed black man just happened to be Lebron James that cop would be charged with murder without a second thought. Pretty much all of the recent cases (Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, etc.) have been poor men who had criminal records.

While there have been serial killer who have been equal opportunity killers, murdering any prostitute regardless of color (such as the Green River Killer in my own Washington state), most in fact hunt within their own groups.
Case in point: When Ted Bundy from prison had been offering his assistance to the Seattle police to catch the Green River Killer (as close to a real life Silence Of The Lambs as you're going to get), he was thrown by the fact that the Killer (Gary Ridgeway) had murdered black women as well as white women. After all, Bundy himself had only murdered Caucasian girls.

Thug can be a dog whistle, but the context must be taken into account. Myself and quite a few libertarians, for example, refer to authoritative tactics, specifically those regarding speech, as 'thuggish' without any racial subtext, while quite a bit of the recent commentary on the unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore has used the dog whistle version. Like most things, a modicum of thought can easily distinguish the usage, unless the speaker is deliberately conflating the two for the partisan point scoring purposes.

To be sure, thug has been used by the capitalist right to describe union members, apparently for just agitating for better wages, benefits, and working conditions for working men and women. Then again, said right wingers are projecting their own worst qualities on the labor movement.

Due to their association with the "scientific racism" movement, these terms are extremely archaic in most discourse (including this converation). Just use "black" and "white" - it leads to less misinterpretation.

It's what the US uses for identification of races IIRC.

"Black" is fairly broad. It could mean a dark skinned Arab/Mexican or an African (the former two being absent from the "Black Lives Matter" stuff, ironically). If we're talking about Africans in regards to what this thread pertains to, then Negroid works.

Negroid = African.

I suppose African-American works best.

Where I come from, "thug" tends to be applied to criminals of a specific European descent.

Which shows how silly it is when people get hung up on words. They designed the dictionary so there'd be no need to think otherwise.

But then, when we're dealing with the Twitter talking point era where there's little in the way of actual arguments, I suppose it goes that people will start twisting words into meaning more than what it originally conveys.

I think thug came to be associated with blacks specifically because "gangsta" types in black communities called themselves such, and whites eventually picked up on it.

Not only that, but such broad racial classifications (which essentially split the world into 3, with the 3rd being the Mongoloids) are not particularly valid. It's much more valid to look at ethnic group than it is to look at race.

For example, generally the standards in the U.S. military for evaluating for sickle-cell anemia do work, but there are limitations. For example, peoples with origins in western equatorial Africa, who the vast majority of African-Americans are, do have higher rates of sickle-cell anemia, but not peoples with origins in, say, southern Africa. Also, peoples with origins in southern Europe around the Mediterranean basin have higher rates of sickle-cell anemia (think Americans of Italian, Greek, and Turkish origin), but aren't screened for it thanks to the blunt instrument of race.