I'm going with Michael Smolensky's answer, since I heard that phrase from a brash loudmouth of an investment banker to mean in [greater] detail.. (Printers like me, who are the lowest form of animal life to bankers, wondered if the 'granular' meant wheat, bran, rye or just plain chaff...)
Definitions for thugging. Here are all the possible meanings and translations of the word thugging. Wiktionary(0.00 / 0 votes)Rate this definition: thugging(Noun) thuggery; the behaviour of a thug.
If he was a thug, then clearly if a black person says thugs were messing up the neighborhood, then they mean something other than reprehensible, shall we say, N-word. We have different races in this country, and different races have different ways of using language. Thug ends up straddling different subcultures.