Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage

This insightful if dense history from Pulitzer Prize winner Thompson (Blood in the Water) revisits the infamous 1984 New York City subway shooting of four Black teenagers by white 37-year-old Bernhard Goetz. Thompson begins by recapping the lives of Goetz and victim Darrell Cabey in the shooting’s lead-up, juxtaposing Goetz’s anxious acquisition of illegal firearms after a mugging with Cabey’s listlessness after dropping out of school. The shooting itself is depicted with bloody detail, heightening the horror of Goetz being “heralded... as a hero” by many white New Yorkers. Also examined is the hotly debated criminal trial, where Goetz was acquitted, and the later civil trial that found him liable. Along the way, Thompson spotlights harrowing discrimination against the teens, including the Crime Victim Board denying them compensation for not being “innocent” victims and the civil defense’s gross attempts to prove that a paralyzed Cabey was “faking” brain damage. Arguing that Goetz’s shooting “unleashed and normalized” a new strain of “white rage,” Thompson devotes the concluding section to tracking the mainstreaming of that rage, from Rupert Murdoch’s founding of Fox News to the rise of Donald Trump. This section, however, can get lost in the weeds, with ponderous asides, such as how President Biden’s Child Tax Credit “would have made a huge difference to the five Cabey kids.” Still, it’s a searing critique of white America’s racial resentments. (Feb.)