Chapter 1: Between Rage and a Hard Place: A Cautionary Tale of Colin Ferguson, Racial Politics, and Caribbean American Mental Health

On December 7^th 1993, Colin Ferguson, a 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant, shot and killed six passengers aboard a Hicksville-bound Long Island Railroad train and injured nineteen others (McQuiston, 1995). Attempts to explore the reason for the shooting revealed Ferguson’s deep-seated psychological issues. Yet, this reflected a major historical mass murder trial in the United States (US) with an overt and provocative racial context. It was fueled by the defendant’s perceived (Oh, Yang, Anglin, & DeVylder, 2014; Soto, Dawson-Andoh, & BeLue, 2011) and likely experienced (Chae, Lincoln, & Jackson, 2011; Grier & Cobbs, 1968; hooks, 1996) racial injustice. US-citizens and immigrants alike, including Ferguson, had to consider the position that race and power occupy in the US. They had to consider how persistently experiencing, witnessing and/or perceiving US racial discrimination could make a person angry and that this response was a justifiable response to racism (hooks, 1996).