Thompson’s ‘Fear and Fury’ looks at Goetz’s shooting
When Ronald Reagan stopped in the South Bronx during his 1980 presidential campaign, he chose a dilapidated lot as the site for a press cluster. Looking over the ruins before reporters and borough residents, Reagan claimed that he’d not “seen anything like this since London after the Blitz.” Indeed, we now know that Reaganomics — financial deregulation, union busting, and social program defunding — did much to blow up economic gains that middle class and working class families made in the 35 years following WWII. That conservative revolution also initiated a 28-year period of boom/bust market storms that eventually turned cyclonic during the 2008 global economic meltdown.
Meanwhile, Thompson continues, the wealthiest Americans, freed from contributing their fair share to the national tax burden, became richer and began living at a greater remove from their middle income compatriots. Coupled with the general “white flight” from urban centers to suburban bedroom communities, cities like New York — still emerging from the layered local and national economic crises of the 1970s — could not underwrite the jobs and social programs to aid economically limited families and young people.
With flathead screwdrivers in their jacket pockets, Canty, Allen, Ramseur, and Cabey hatched a caper; they’d voyage from the Bronx to a downtown video arcade where they would pry “open the coin receptacles on arcade games and pinball machines” and pocket the change. Canty knew from experience that they would also need some money in their pockets in order to ward off suspicion from arcade managers, so he suggested that they panhandle for a few bucks from folks on the buses and trains they’d hop to travel into Manhattan. This is the plot that put the four on the 2 train heading to Chambers Street in Greenwich Village.
Though all hailed from the birthplace and incubator of the 20th century’s most important popular and dance musics — Jazz, salsa, doo-wop, and hip hop — in the early ’80s, the South Bronx was only a synonym for crime, arson, and urban decay. “To the other passengers on that subway car, these four teens must have seemed a rather ragtag crew, but hardly an imposing one. They were all skinny, and at five foot six, James was the tallest, with the other boys each standing two inches shorter. Still, the rest of the passengers on the 2 train that day absolutely took notice of the boys. By the 1980s, adults regarded almost any band of loud young people with a bit of wariness, and this group was being particularly boisterous. What’s more, these were Black teens, and male to boot, the sort of kids too many people in this city now just assumed were dangerous.”
Importantly, Thompson rejects stereotyping the teens as thuggish stickup kids. Instead, she crafts social, personal, and familial narratives to humanize them. This is especially necessary for Cabey, who, after his interaction with Bernie Goetz, would never be able to fend for himself again.
When Goetz stepped onto the 2 train at the 14th Street station, rather than sit away from the four teens, he chose a seat “directly across from where Troy was standing, diagonal from Barry, and a ways down from Darrell and James, who were seated at the very end, just on the other side of the conductor’s cabin in the next car.” In line with their panhandling plan, Canty stepped toward Goetz asking, with a small smile, “How about giving us five bucks?” Asked to repeat himself, he ventured the same request.
Goetz rose slowly, “unzipped his jacket and turned as if to retrieve some cash, but instead, he suddenly spun around. Assuming a combat stance, he pulled a gun out of his waistband and began shooting.” After blasting Canty in the chest and Allen, who attempted to flee, in his back, Goetz fired upon Ramseur, sending a bullet through his arm and into his side. Finally, Goetz “stopped just in front of Darrell, looming over him as Darrell said plaintively, ‘I didn’t do nothing!’” With chilling sobriety, Goetz “raised his gun again and said, ‘You don’t look so bad, here’s another,’ before shooting Darrel point-blank.” Some other rider pulled the emergency brake, halting that train just shy of the Chambers Street station. From Goetz’s entry to car no. 7 at 14th Street to his firing multiple bullets into four bodies to the train halting mid-tunnel, only two minutes had elapsed.
In the midst of mayhem and carnage, Goetz made his way out of the tunnel to street level and back to his apartment. Though he was unidentified, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post immediately celebrated the subway gunman for “valiantly” taking out street toughs. Simultaneously, the four South Bronx teens were immediately villainized. In fact, once Canty, Allen, Ramseur, and Cabey were named in Post stories, even as they lay hospitalized following surgeries to save their lives and repair their shredded innards, Judges Alan Marrus and Stanley Katz issued a series of bench warrants for petty offenses such as turnstile hopping, failing to respond to a summons, and “stealing $14 in quarters.” Before they could recover from the shock of the attack, the teens had been publicly stamped as career criminals.
While the other three would eventually regain physical ability and seek restitution for Goetz’s assault, Cabey was left paralyzed from the waist down and suffered a prolonged cardiac arrest and coma that damaged his brain and cognitive abilities. One of the most brutal aspects of this book is reading quotations of the hate mail that families of the teens received. Thompson draws lines of intersection from these awful missives to other instances of nightmarish anti-Black violence in the city: the 1983 police killing of Michael Stewart; the October 1984 police killing of Eleanor Bumpurs; the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, Queens; and the 1989 case of the Central Park Five.
Nine days after the shooting, Goetz, who’d been roving around New England, finally turned himself into police in Concord, N.H. First, in a taped interview with an NYC Assistant District Attorney and police detectives from both NYPD and the NY Transit Authority and later, in interviews and court proceedings, Goetz admitted that he went into the subway looking to kill anyone who approached him. He also admitted that the South Bronx teens did not threaten him or anyone else in car no. 7 on the downtown 2 train. Though he claimed that his actions were not motivated by racial animus, Goetz freely and frequently argued that New York City would be better off without n-words or Hispanics.
Though jurors would see and hear this evidence at trial, Goetz’s attorney, Barry Slotkin, swayed them to believe that the shooter, stricken by fear and trauma, was the victim while the teens, driven by innate criminality, were the assailants.
In 2017 Thompson, a heralded University of Michigan professor of history, received a Pulitzer Prize for her riveting and exhaustively researched narrative history, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.” That book illustrates that Thompson is especially skilled at untangling complex legal proceedings and repackaging them as potent narrative. “Fear and Fury” is similarly powerful when Thompson works through the machinations of both Goetz’s criminal trial and the civil case that Shirley Cabey, Darrell’s mother, brought against Goetz.
Though she has painted a sharply accurate contextual picture of 1980s America and shown readers how to see that decade as the seed bed for our current national difficulties, Thompson’s argument that Reagan-era politics ignited white rage seems slightly askew. As Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” (2016), Brando Simeo Starkey’s “Their Accomplices Wore Robes” (2025), and Thompson’s own “Blood in the Water” argue, white rage is a dangerous virus, older than the nation itself, endemic to the US body politic, and always on the verge of breaking out, taking us down, or disappearing us altogether.
Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
By Heather Ann Thompson
Pantheon, 560 pages, $35
Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of “The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism.”
