Young Adult Africans, Not White Kids - Then, Of Course, Snowballing Would Have Been Perfectly Kosher - Part 2

The problem with the news story captioned “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Declines to Charge ‘Kid’ Throwing Snowballs at NYPD Officers” (Washington Examiner 2/27/26), inheres in the all-too-predictable fact that both the Washington Examiner and its original source of the news story, namely, the New York Post, well appear to be flagrantly obsessed with cheaply scapegoating just one of the more than a dozen, or so, young Black Men/Males reportedly involved in what was categorically and emphatically described as a “skirmish.”

Such stereotypical scapegoating is eerily reminiscent of the response of a lynch mob of the kind that used to be deemed to be perfectly normal not quite long ago all over the United States of America. It is eerily abominable because it also informs the general American public of the bewildering but not altogether flabbergasting fact that, even as the jaded saying goes, “The more things appear to have changed in a supposedly more civilized and a more culturally refined Mainstream American Society, the more they even more crudely appear to be the same.”

You see, one would have ordinarily expected that, in view of the fact that the widely alleged throwing of the snowballs at the NYPD officers who had evidently been dispatched to the scene of the aforementioned “skirmish,” that at least a couple of the widely reported “skirmishers” would have been arrested by the NYPD cops. But there is something at once weird, odd and very disturbing here, at least reckoned from the context and the semantic perspective of the news headlines carried by both the New York Post and the Washington Examiner, which ran as follows: “Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Declines to Charge ‘Kid’ Throwing Snowballs at NYPD Officers.”

Well, if, indeed, the one “kid” who is categorically named in the news story, which is also strangely bylined as “Washington Examiner Staff,” had really been involved in a “skirmish” sparked or provoked by at least a “dozen kids,” as had been widely reported by the media, including all the major television, radio and cable networks in New York City, then how come that only one of the active participants among the aforementioned “skirmishers” is/was being so venomously targeted for arrest and criminal prosecution by both the staff and, it also seems, the entire editorial staffs of both the New York Post and the Washington Examiner, both of which media establishments are widely known to be chockfull of journos known to be ideologically unabashedly self-proclaimed “conservative” in psychological and moral orientation?

Could there have really occurred a “skirmish” of Class-A Felony, as is being claimed here by both the Washington Examiner and the New York Post, in which there was only a single participant? Or are readers and the general public being knavishly, conveniently and grossly misled into believing that it was only this single Black/African American individual male who had, somehow, capriciously undertaken the highly unlikely and, at the very best or worst, what would appear to have been an epically daunting Sisyphian snowball with what appeared to this author to be a platoon of at least two dozen NYPD officers or cops?

Now, it goes without saying that this kind of hatchet reportage is both inexcusably and inescapably borne out of the sort of visceral and pathologically and/or clinically incurable level of hatred that is widely known to have afflicted self-proclaimed White-American Conservatives since the very inception of the European-created or cannibalized Imperial Mega-Republic of the United States of America in the last quarter of the 18th century?

I cannot pretend, peacock fashion, not to be able to literally wrap my head around such morally withering “State-of-Nature” level of implacable animus by some self-proclaimed White and/or Republican Conservatives, clearly of the MAGA Brand or Breed of Mainstream American Political Culture. Now, let us examine that equally weird and insufferably capricious aspect of the subject of the aforereferenced story categorically and venomously selected by both the staff and the editorial boards of the Washington Examiner and the New York Post for this Post-Emancipation Media Lynching.

We are meanspiritedly informed that it is a 27-year-old “Male” by the name of Gusmane Coulibaly; very likely, the latter is actually 17 years old. But he is both Black and obviously Indigenous Continental African in Origin or Descent, so let’s add at least 10 more years to his actual biological age to make Gusmane Coulibaly fit the stereotype of the intellectually, emotionally and psychologically Good, Old Sambo of the Hood. Now, the name “Coulibaly,” also “Kulibaly” and “Koulibaly,” my Google-AI Search tells me is a surname or a Clan name - to be categorically differentiated from the European-American MAGA-oriented terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan - predominantly used or carried by the “Mandinka” and the “Bambara” people in the West African Subregion of the so-called Sub-Saharan Africa.

And by the way, the “Mandinka” also go by the ethnic name of “Mandingo” or historically and linguistically the “Malinka.” Now, any person with a remarkable smattering knowledge of Colonial and Postcolonial American History, in particular regarding the Era of the Massive European Enslavement of Indigenous Continental African People, must be well aware of the fact that anybody with the last or the surname of “Coulibaly” must come from an ancestral lineage that constituted, by my own guesstimation, at least 30-percent of the Chattel-Enslaved Africans who laid the industrial and the economic foundations of Contemporary whatAmerican Civilization.

Now, what the preceding also implies is the unarguable fact that if any group or category of residents and/or citizens of the United States of America deserves to have their civil and their human rights jealously protected, it is definitely people like Gusmane Coulibaly, and not the members of the latter-day, largely freeloading European-American editorial staffs and the relatively arrivant publishers of the Washington Examiner and, of course, the New York Post. We could, of course, delve more deeply into the presumable ethnicity and the cultural backgrounds of those journos who appear to be rather bestially and cannibalistically poised to having 27-year-old Gusmane Coulibaly summarily arrested and criminally charged and permanently banished from American Society, but civil diplomacy and the fundamental dictates and tenets of human rights and ethics - of course, there also exists the moral and the philosophical concept of animal ethics - dictates extreme tolerance and restraint.

Ultimately, ours is a Society of Laws and the right to judicial and juridical fairness and equity. The fact that Mr. Gusmane Coulibaly has been alleged to have been previously arrested and charged with attempted robbery at a subway station somewhere in The Bronx, New York City, and had a case that was still pending at the time of the reportage of the news story being herein discussed, does not necessarily and/or automatically mean that the subject is/was guilty as charged without being forensically and prosecutorial proven as such. Except, of course, as has been the case for as long as any of us can remember, simply and merely being phenotypically Black and/or African-Descended American Citizen or Resident makes one preemptively guilty, ab initio.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]