As far as I can see, Sherman is a good ballplayer who got emotionally worked up at a time when one would/should/could expect as much. Way too much has been made of it.
He’s been characterized incorrectly IMHO, but I won’t judge those doing it to be racially motivated in their use of the word. Perhaps some are, but I’d suspect way more to be either “bandwagoning” the use of a convenient word, or more likely still, just completely ignorant, as ‘foose pointed out.
Sherman, tired of being called a thug (understandably), probably felt unjustly targeted. My guess is that he’s felt that way before due to situations that genuinely were of racial origins, thus he felt justified in using the transitive property here to describe the misuse of “thug”.
But that doesn’t make it so.
