Editors note:

The following essay is in response to an e-mail sent to the author in reference to the article found in the article: She finally has a home: Harvard Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid

Every so often I get an email or read a story like this one and think, "Too bad she isn't going to a university where she can get a real education, to a school like Howard University, where my daughter graduated." Too bad blacks are still so sick that they think a eurocentric environment (educational, employment, political party, institution, etc.) is where they should aspire to be. Sick as in a lack of personal self esteem, community relationshp and cultural orientation. Sick as in ready to sacrifice identity and culture for thirty pieces of alabaster. Sick to think the white boy's ice is colder. Sad isn't it that in 2010 they willingly still participate in what Carter G. Woodson called "the miseducation of the negro". Sick to think they still are afflicted by what Franz Fanon termed "black skin, white mask." Sick to still be, as E. Franklin Frazier said, "black bourgeoisie." Sick to strive to be, as Nathan Hare wrote, "black anglo-saxons."

Who cares where CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN are? Wherever they are, they're taking care of their media business, their white agenda. Don't you have an agenda to take care of. If you do, please attend to it. If you don't, please get a black agenda: for education, media, employment, purchasing and community action. One that includes a black college or university for the higher education of our youth and our adults. How in the living world is this young lady going to find a "home" in a fundamentally historically racist, sexist institution, part of a coalition of white elitist private institutions, the Ivy League, one part of the tri-partite pillars of U. S. white supremacy which includes, the University, the Church, and the Corporation? In reality, she is still "homeless', only now it's intellectual, spiritual, cultural and psychological homelessness. At best she will be a black pimple on a pig's behind. Is that something to desire to be?

If Hollywood were to make a film about her, which they won't because it won't fit the "Precious" motif, it would still turn out with white folks saving another negress. They specialize in films that show individual black folks serving white folks' interests, i.e. Home of the Brave, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Gone With The Wind, starring Sydney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne and on and on. Read Donald Bogle's, "Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies & Bucks".

The tragedy in this story is not hers alone. The tragedy is that every step of the way, every step of her way, through family, neighborhood, school, community, city and state the brainwash, the whitewash was going on, and apparently will continue for four more years at her new uiversity "home". Don't cry for her; cry for yourself. You just don't understand America, and from the likes of your commentary, never will.