Without Trumpism, Democrats and anti–Donald Trump conservatives tell themselves, America can once again be the nation it always was. This political moment, many feel certain, is an aberration, an unfortunate detour from who we are and what we stand for. Surely, they hope, if the MAGA Republicans can just be unseated in this fall’s midterm elections, then once Trump leaves office, this country can get back on track.
But the political space we inhabit has deep roots. It did not erupt out of nowhere in 2016. The racialized rage and contempt for the rule of law that so thoroughly mark the present are the products of a longer political project set in motion during the 1980s, when the Reagan Revolution—itself anchored in white resentment—recast racial violence as necessary and defensible, restoring to it a legitimacy that had not been seen since the Jim Crow era and the Gilded Age.
One particularly notorious event, which took place four decades ago on a New York City subway car just three days before Christmas, both reflected and fueled this dramatic political shift. On December 22, 1984, a downtown-bound 2 train rattled out of the 14th Street station, its walls layered in graffiti, its riders reading newspapers or staring silently in the exhausted intimacy of a city still struggling to rebound from a major fiscal crisis in the 1970s—and finding this new decade even more challenging.
On the subway car that day were four Black teenagers who lived in the same housing project in the heart of the South Bronx—Darrell Cabey, James Ramseur, Barry Allen, and Troy Canty. This neighborhood had been especially ravaged in recent years: recreational opportunities ended, public libraries closed, streets left grim by an illegal economy of drugs and sex that had become one of the few remaining ways to make money. With little else to do on what was an unseasonably balmy afternoon, this group of friends decided to head into Manhattan. Their plan for the day was modest and desperate at once—to stop at a video arcade, jimmy open a few coin receptacles, and come away with at least a few stolen dollars in their pockets.
Seated in the same car, directly across from two of the teenagers, was a white loner named Bernie Goetz. A 37-year-old single, self-employed electronics nerd living in Greenwich Village, Goetz was also trying to simply live his life in a city coming apart at the seams. He still had a decent income and a roof over his head, but Goetz’s own material security did not temper the growing resentment he felt every time he stepped outside his apartment and onto city streets. Disconcerting numbers of unhoused people were in Union Square Park, and visibly ill men—gaunt, with lesions and ragged coughs—streamed each day into the emergency room at the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. Meanwhile, trash littered the sidewalks and piled up on stoops, and the illicit economy seemed to occupy every corner.