" This was in 1986. New York in the 1980s was one of the angriest, most racially divided places in the world. This was the time of subway shooter Bernie Goetz, the Howard Beach massacre, and the Central Park jogger case. It was a time when blacks protesting the beating of four teenagers by a mob of young whites in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bensonhurst could be met by a crowd that, unfazed by TV cameras, waved watermelons at them and chanted, “Niggers go home!” The city was a war zone, a tinderbox of race hatred ready to blow at any time. "

― Matt Taibbi , The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap