Gotham Becoming Gomorrah

Christopher Oliphant

Fear and Fury:
The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
By Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon Books: New York NY, 2026, 560 pages, $35 hardback.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is the Pulitzer Prize winning author known for her work Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971, as well as Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker where she writes about the criminal justice system.

Thompson’s groundbreaking new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, explores the racial dynamics of rage from the 1980s to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the Kyle Rittenhouse shootings, and Donald Trump’s takeover of American politics. Her central argument is that the Reagan ’80s laid the foundation for the assault on democracy and rights that characterizes the present.

One might recall the opening lyrics to Kendrick Lamar’s 2011 track “Ronald Reagan Era,”

“Welcome to vigilante ’80s,
so don’t you ask me;
I’m hungry, my body’s
antsy . . .”

Or remember the lines from “A.D.H.D.” from the same year and same artist,

“you know when you part of Section.80;
you feel like no one can relate;
‘cause you are, you are, a loner, loner . . .”

The Shooting and Background

The story of the Reagan eighties is one of loneliness, despair, isolation and individual revenge.

On December 22, 1984 the white loner Bernhard Goetz remorselessly shot four Black teenagers: Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, Troy Canty and Barry Allen.

Thompson describes the four teens as appearing to be “a rather ragtag crew” to other passengers on the no. 7 of the 2 train headed downtown to Manhattan. (75)

Holidays were complicated for kids from the South Bronx; the tradition of gift-giving was an uneasy reminder of “Dreams Dashed.” The 1980s, for young people of New York City, were to be better than the previous decade that had been defined by a global recession. Yet Darrell’s neighborhood, in the eyes of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, stood in the way of this goal.

The biographical detail that Thompson imputes to the humans in this story presents a vivid image of the period.

Many Americans failed to grasp how the Reagan years would transform society from the New Deal and the boom of the post-World War II years. But families like the Cabeys — among the hardest hit by cuts to funding for food assistance, job training, and health care — “would feel these cuts most directly and profoundly,” harboring little illusion that the system was made for people like them. (29)

Darrell lived with his mother Shirley in the South Bronx, an area that would become “a dumping ground” in New York City, filled with privately owned salvage yards and a recycling center, dump trucks disposing of their loads.

Darrell was known for his ability to breakdance before it became all the rage in the early 1980s as a distraction, thanks to MTV, from the difficulties of living in the South Bronx.

The 1970s dealt a blow to what resources the South Bronx had; families faced the loss of job markets, eradication of educational paths out of poverty, and loss of housing stock to demolition or abandonment.

Thompson sharply and characteristically writes that, “[t]his devastation was not simply spatial or abstract; it was felt directly by the neighborhood’s residents.” (15)

“White Middle Class” Resentment

New Yorkers’ lived experience entering a new era is what a reader of the book becomes familiar with throughout its gripping, twisting and turning journey.

Bernie Goetz lived a neglected childhood that was superficially idyllic. His father, also named Bernhard, emigrated from Germany in 1935 and came to operate a successful book-binding business called Mutual Specialty Products that allowed a comfortable life for his family. Yet Bernie Sr. spent most of his days in the office and was uncompromisingly stern with his wife and a rigid disciplinarian with his children.

Bernie Jr. struggled to socialize with his classmates, though academically he was an achiever. Spending his earliest years in Greenwich Village, after his father was indicted on 18 counts including child endangerment and third-degree assault and found guilty of eight, Bernie was shipped away to school in Switzerland with little explanation. He would later graduate from N.Y.U. as an engineer.

Social Security, Federal Housing Authority loans, the GI Bill, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs helped to create opportunities for white Americans to climb the social ladder. Many white Americans, thanks to the New Deal, became homeowners and secured union jobs with health and safety protections.

The fact that many New Deal-era opportunities had been lost to Black and brown Americans went unappreciated by most of their counterparts. The 1960s and 1970s were a tumultuous time when Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer and others brought attention to the absence of equality between races.

Their activism would manifest in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discriminatory access to schools, to buses and to jobs.

White Americans, finding themselves in the “middle-class,” would come to find such legislation that reined in racial discrimination “a bridge too far.” Liberal social welfare programs were seen as “mere handouts rather than a needed hand up.” (27)

Meanwhile, leaders in the Republican Party were determined to square the circle of their opposition to high taxes versus public support for taxing the rich. Richard Nixon capitalized on racial hostilities to convince white Democratic voters that Republicans stood for their racial interests.

Ronald Reagan exploited the “racial rage to greater success,” arguing that excessive government spending was the reason minorities “lagged behind.”

The “Reagan Revolution” reversed decades of Keynesian economic policy, dramatically cutting taxes for the wealthy under the pretense that wealth would trickle-down; cuts to social spending would allow for the creation of jobs and improve the economic situation for the nation. (28)

One aspect of Thompson’s work that stands out is a perceptive grasp of the role of culture, particularly tabloid media, in playing on the fears of many and influencing public opinion.

While newspapers such as El Diario La Prensa and Amsterdam News, the city’s main Spanish-language and Black outlets, frankly chronicled the worsening conditions and resistance to them, the New York Post — bought up by Rupert Murdoch — and the Daily News would use sensationalism as a means “to pander to, rile up, and even create a very particular new reader demographic: fearful and angry white city residents.” (54)

Couching coverage of current events in language that “simply” spoke the “truth” to ordinary people allowed for difficult-to-sell conservative ideas to become easy to swallow for white Americans, creating “a literal revolution in the way Americans would be informed about the world.” (55)

By the early ’80s, the New York Post had become one of the nation’s most circulated daily newspapers. The effect of the paper’s support for the Reagan administration was to transform the public concern over “drugs, decay, and despair into an all-out crime panic.”

This “crisis” would be taken up by CBS and NBC, fueling the sentiment that “crime was somehow endemic to ‘certain’ communities, rather than a result of the economic overhauls and the stripping of needed resources that defined this decade.” (59)

At the same time, “vigilante justice” entranced popular culture through series like Dirty Harry, Strike Force, Hunter, The Equalizer and films such as The Exterminator and Death Wish. This was the context in which Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels would unapologetically rough up alleged criminals, seeing no contradiction in breaking the law to protect the public from crime. (61)

On the 2 Train

Sliwa’s Guardian Angels, however, were not aboard the 2 train towards Chambers Street station hauling Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, Barry Allen, Troy Canty and Bernie Goetz. On December 22, 1984, a warm winter day filled with holiday spirit and hope for brighter days, the teenagers sought to escape their boredom and everyday drudgery.

The boys made a plan to sneak onto the bus and hop subway turnstiles to make their way to a video arcade where they could procure some money. There, the tried-and-true method of prying open coin receptacles on game machines could afford them a chance to enjoy the holidays.

But first, thinking ahead, the boys needed some pocket change to elude any manager who might catch them hanging around a pinball machine waiting to play a game without the cash to do so. Therefore, Troy, the thinker in the crew, would ask people along their journey if they had any money to spare.

Bernie also had a plan on this day. He wanted to step away from frustrating work on electronic equipment to meet some people for a drink. He did not share the holiday cheer of other passengers on the train; he was more concerned with what was wrong in the city.

Bernie was prepared to deal with anyone who might embody what he felt was to blame for the “decay” of the city. He was carrying a .38 Smith & Wesson in a quick-draw holster loaded purposefully with two hollow point bullets followed by “plus P hollow points with a jacketed nose” which were far more devastating on impact than the usual ammunition. (74)

Some passengers took notice of the bustling group of kids on one end of the train, but none took much notice of Bernie Goetz shuffling on. Bernie chose a seat directly across from where Troy stood, diagonal from Barry and down from Darrell and James, who were seated at the very end.

That Bernie had gravitated towards them was unusual for the boys; it was stranger still that Bernie would stare directly at them, looking each in the eyes. Troy broke the awkward silence, saying, “Hey, what’s up?”, “How about giving us five bucks?” Bernie asked Troy to repeat himself, and so Troy said, again, “How about giving us five bucks?” (78)

Bernie rose from his seat now, retrieving his weapon and assuming a combat stance, beginning to shoot. Bernie did not stop with Troy; after taking three steps back, he kept pulling the trigger. Troy had dropped to the floor and Barry began to flee only to receive a bullet in his back as he too collapsed.

Bernie made his way now to the other two boys as James was frozen with shock and fear, deciding to make a run for it, but he soon encountered the next bullet from Bernie’s unregistered weapon.

Darrell had stood from his seat by this point, and felt a bullet narrowly miss him. Bernie loomed over Darrell, now sitting down gripping onto the edge of the subway seat, and Darrell said, “I didn’t do nothing!”

In a cold and calculating manner, Bernie responded, “You don’t look too bad, here’s another,” and shot Darrell point-blank. (80)

Aftermath and Lasting Damage

Bernie did not immediately flee the scene after the train came to a screeching halt. He took time to assist the conductor, Armando Soler, attend to a white woman, Mary Gant, who was shoved to the floor as Bernie unloaded his weapon.

The teens were in bad shape, mostly unresponsive to questions and sitting in pools of blood. Bernie asked Mary, “Miss, are you all right? Did I hurt you? Did I hit you?” helping her back to her seat. This was disturbing to see for another passenger, Victor Flores, who had moments previously seen Bernie look into the eyes of the kids he shot.

Arnethea Gilbert came from the next car over to assist whomever might be hurt. She spoke to Troy Canty who expressed that, “He shot me for nothing . . . I didn’t do anything. I only asked him for five dollars.”

Troy was concerned that he was dying and shot through the heart, Arnethea provided words of reassurance. Arnethea also checked on Darrell, who was unable to move, speaking quietly, Darrell said clearly to Arnethea, “I didn’t do anything. He shot me for nothing.” (84-85).

Bernie quietly got up from his seat and made his way through the subway’s sliding doors, making his escape. The teenagers were taken to Bellevue and St. Vincent’s Hospital, Bernie rented a vehicle and drove to Vermont then New Hampshire, where he would later turn himself in and confessed to what “had to be done.”

It is difficult to estimate the damage that Bernie wrought on this day. The lived experiences of the boys and their families were erased from the media narratives.

Troy, the youngest child of five, came to be treated as the “vilest of criminals” (445); after being berated and belittled in the courtroom, he became more discouraged by the difficulties of his life.

He eventually made it into a drug rehabilitation program, married, and learned to become a mechanic. But he would never again share his story and went off the grid.

Barry Allen was devasted emotionally and physically too, fielding threatening phone calls while in the hospital and being viewed by the public as a “thug and predator.”

Barry spiraled downward after the second grand jury proceedings. He would spend a decade in and out of prison, being released for good in 1995, but would die within a decade from the damage that years of poverty, drug use and abysmal health care while in prison wrought. (446)

James Ramseur’s already precarious life became worse, never coming to fully understand why he was “painted as a horrible person by reporters, by the television media, by those who sent him hate mail, by the cops who interviewed him in the hospital, by Barry Slotnick on the stand, and by a jury that refused to hold his assailant responsible for shooting him.” (447)

James made desperate pleas to the public for empathy that never came, and ended up being arrested for a brutal crime against a woman that he maintained he never committed. After getting out of prison, he swallowed a handful of prescription pills and was discovered dead the next morning.

Shirley Cabey, Darrell’s mother, moved her family out of the South Bronx to Spring Valley, New York. Darrell was paralyzed from the shooting, and lost cognitive abilities after falling into a coma in the hospital.

Every day, Shirley had to take care of her son’s basic needs. She spent her time dressing him and checking on him for bed ulcers, as Darrell lived his life watching and listening to the Yankees on the television and radio, listening to music, even though his days of breakdancing and playing sports were likely painful to recall. (448)

After Shirley fought for years in a civil case in which she won a multimillion dollar settlement, she never saw a penny from Goetz.

A Story of Betrayal

In addition to being about loneliness, isolation, despair and individual revenge, this story is one of betrayal of the abandoned, as the Reagan Revolution deepened inequality and desperation, and allowed for figures like Donald Trump to draw from the “tabloid tradition that had made a celebrity of Goetz.” (426)

The American tradition of vigilantism would continue through figures like Alex Fields Jr., who drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, killing Heather Heyer and injuring thirty-five others.

It would continue in the killing of a Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, by white civilians while jogging in a Georgia neighborhood. It would continue in the killing of George Floyd while being arrested for a misdemeanor. That Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty after shooting and killing an anti-racist protestor in Wisconsin vindicated white vigilantism as morally and legally acceptable.

Thompson ends the book on a hopeful note, suggesting that “misinformation does not always triumph.” The history of the United States is contradictory in that time and again, against extraordinary odds, ordinary people come to recognize their common interests to lessen income inequality, repel racism and ensure equal justice under the law.

She suggests that those with the least to lose, who have the least, have every reason to fight for a society in which there is a real future for everyone’s children. (450)

May-June 2026, ATC 242