Okay thug is exclusively reserved for Indian people. It's our word, stop using it :p
I've never heard it in a racial manner either. The play of words is silly, it just shifts the attention from the real issues at hand i.e. excessive police brutality and civic unrest.
There was just a piece on NPR claiming thug now means ni__er, at least when white people say it. I'm white and always thought it mean something more along the lines of soccer hooligan or bully. Am I that out of touch?
No. I can't draw, but if someone asked me to draw a picture of a "thug", it would probably end up being some sort of film noir 1930s small-time hold-up guy.
Terms like "thug" "lynch" etc have always felt weird to me when people insist that they are racialized, but in the media the last several years I've heard it in higher correlation to a black purported criminal than a white one. But when I was a kid, I grew up in a town where there was a single black family. "lynch" was something that happened to cattle rustlers, and "thug" meant an italian gangster.