Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe:

Baltimore burns, shops are looted, rioters attack firefighters with bottles and bricks. And amid all the violence and ruin, what drives the chattering class into a froth of indignation? That anyone would use the word “thugs” to describe the vandals and criminals reducing Baltimore to rubble.

As berserkers ran amok Monday, the city’s mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, deplored the destruction: “Too many people have invested in building up this city to allow thugs to tear it down.”

That set the hounds baying. Rawlings-Blake was accused of using a racial slur. Baltimore City Councilor Carl Stokes angrily told CNN that calling rioters “thugs” is just like calling them the N-word. The Rev. Jamal Bryant, the eulogist at Freddie Gray’s funeral, repeated the accusation: “?‘Thugs’ is the 21st-century word for the N-word,” he said Wednesday, “and it is repulsive and it is offensive.” Wale, the popular Washington, D.C.-based rapper, told Baltimore teens that Rawlings-Blake owed them a direct apology for saying something so “stupid.” Others piled on.

It didn’t take long for the mayor to surrender. “We don’t have thugs in Baltimore. . . . We have a lot of kids that are acting out,” she told a group of church leaders. For good measure, she blamed her “little anger interpreter,” pointing to her head in self-abasement. There was more apologizing online. “I wanted to clarify my comments on ‘thugs,’?” she tweeted. “When you speak out of frustration and anger, one can say things in a way that you don’t mean.”

More.