Review of Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon, 2026)
On December 22, 1984, a pale, dweeby, thirty-seven-year-old white man named Bernhard Goetz boarded a subway car bound for Lower Manhattan. After taking a seat close to four rambunctious black teenagers — nineteen-year-olds Barry Allen, Darrell Cabey, and Troy Canty, and eighteen-year-old James Ramseur — Goetz started glaring in their direction.
One of these teenagers, Troy Canty, decided to greet Goetz. “Hey, what’s up?” Canty asked. Goetz acknowledged Canty’s greeting in a friendly, if unenthusiastic, manner.
Emboldened, Canty sidled up more closely to Goetz and, with a slight smile curling up on his face, said, “Hey, man. How about giving us five bucks?”
Canty’s request activated Goetz, who looked up and urged Canty to repeat his question. Canty assented. “How about giving us five bucks?” the youngster asked again.
Goetz slowly rose from his seat, unzipped his jacket, and turned toward the subway car window. He then dramatically spun around, removed his unlicensed .38 Smith & Wesson from his waistband, and opened fire on the four unsuspecting, unarmed teenagers.
For a few short moments, Bernie Goetz had transformed the 2 train into a combat zone, the sort of dystopian urban hellscape that so many Americans feared then and today. Miraculously, all of Goetz’s victims survived, although one, Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed from the waist down and sustained irreversible brain damage after falling into a coma.
For a few short moments, Bernie Goetz had transformed the 2 train into a combat zone, the sort of dystopian urban hellscape that so many Americans feared then and today.
In the minds of many Americans, however, Cabey and his friends weren’t victims at all. In fact, they supposedly embodied the decay and criminal depravity that defined New York and most other American cities in the late…
Auteur: Paul Renfro
