Baltimore City Councilman Carl Stokes (D) criticized President Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) for referring to rioters in Baltimore as “thugs” saying, “just call them n*ggers” in an interview on Tuesday’s “OutFront” on CNN.

When asked if “thugs” was the right term to describe the riot, Stokes said, “no, of course it’s not the right word to call our children thugs. These are children who have been set aside, marginalized, who have not been engaged by us. No, we don’t have to call them thugs.”

He was then pressed on whether that justifies the rioting, he stated that while the rioting was unjustified, “calling them thugs — just call them n*ggers. Just call them n*ggers. No, we don’t have to call them by names such as that. We don’t have to do that. That is exactly what we have set them to. Now, when you say ‘come on,’ come on what? You wouldn’t call your child a thug if they should do something that would not be what you would expect them to do.”

Earlier, he declared, “today has been a tremendously good day in Baltimore. We woke up this morning at 5:00 a.m., cleaning up the streets, cleaning up the neighborhoods. People have come out of their doors, no one is staying behind closed doors in Baltimore. The residents are coming out and saying ‘this is our town, this is our city.’ Our issue is justice being served. So, there were a few aberrant, and I know that that was a terrible scene that we saw last night and a little bit on Saturday, but the greater majority, so a few hundred people versus hundreds of thousands of residents of Baltimore city, have come out of their homes and said, ‘this is Baltimore. This is our Baltimore.’ And they’re showing just who we are and why we’re standing up for justice, not only for Freddie Gray, but for all of the Freddie Grays that have been killed or brutalized in Baltimore.”

Stokes did defend the woman who cameras caught disciplining her son during the riots, arguing, “she was trying to save his life. It is clear that it’s better that she hit him than the police hit him and brutalize him and take his life from him.”

(h/t The Right Scoop)

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett