Calling someone a thug is putting them on a continuum that ends with a superpredator. It’s a way of saying: this is what you are, not just what you do—or more often, what other people who look like you have done. A thug is the fictional archetype of Dilulio’s nightmares, a stand-in for a black man that is hopelessly lost to violence or drugs; a vector of crime that needs to be feared and stopped; a caricature instead of a human being.
