How the Bernie Goetz Shootings Explain the Trump Era

"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."

"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."

Many believe that removing Trumpism will restore America to its prior norms, treating the current moment as an aberration. The present political space, however, has deeper origins stretching back to the 1980s. The Reagan Revolution, anchored in white resentment, recast racial violence as necessary and defensible and restored a legitimacy to racialized coercion unseen since Jim Crow and the Gilded Age. Urban decline, fiscal crisis, and social abandonment shaped everyday life for marginalized communities, producing scenes of decay and despair. Specific events from the era illustrate how long-standing policies and sentiments produced the contemporary political landscape.

Read at The Atlantic