I suspect you've missed a subtlety about the situation. If there was a black population, and I've referred to them all as "black thugs" then that's racist. If there's a subset of the population who are thugs and black, and I refer to them as black thugs then that's descriptive.

Like, if he said "the a Romanian programmers gather outside at lunch to smoke", that's not racist if that's what the Romanian programmers do, it's simply descriptive.

Sure, sometimes there's an underlying motivation of unnecessary racial discrimination behind why someone points out a fact, but facts aren't racist of themselves.