"White brothers and sisters: Pocket that But I’m Not Racist! card. I don’t want to hear about your Black girlfriend in college..."

"... or your Black postman to whom you give fruitcake every Christmas, or that Black comp and lit teacher who totally, like, rocked your world. It doesn’t matter if you are racist or not racist or antiracist; our society is racist." 

Writes Don Lemon, in his book "THIS IS THE FIRE/What I Say to My Friends About Racism," quoted in the NYT review of the book "Don Lemon’s New Book Hopes to Guide America Through a Conversation About Race." 

The review is by Wesley Lowery, who notes that you can tell Lemon wrote the book himself because he has an "easily recognizable voice" and "Much like his show, the book jumps around in both content and tone." Lowery, "a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covers issues of race and justice," doesn't seem willing to say anything harsh about Lemon's book, but I don't think he has any respect for it. 

The review ends:

[The book is] both direct in tone and obvious in content — the type of unsparing historical statement from an “openly Black” news anchor likely to prompt some white viewers to clutch their pearls even as Black viewers look at one another and unemotionally remark, “Yeah, we already knew that.” 

As a factual matter, Lemon is right: We have not arrived at this moment, our “race problem” deeply unresolved, by mistake. What remains unclear is whether Lemon’s white readers, and viewers, will be willing to believe it.

Why does Lowery think he knows what how white people will think and feel if they read Don Lemon's book? Why wouldn't we look at one another and unemotionally remark, “Yeah, we already knew that”? Why does Lowery stereotype us as wearers of pearls? Why is he painting a picture of us shocked by things that are well-known? What does he think white people might not be "willing to believe"? 

This is casual smearing of a racial group. The assignment you took on was to review Don Lemon's book. Why won't you tell us what you actually think of it instead of turning to the potential readers, purporting to inhabit their minds, and insulting them?

"In the early nineteen-eighties... a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet."

"It was launched by Craig Raine’s poem 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization—what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie—as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: 'Model T is a room with the lock inside— / a key is turned to free the world / for movement.' Or, later in the poem: 'In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.' For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: 'Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings— / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. / I have never seen one fly, but / Sometimes they perch on the hand.' Teachers liked Raine’s poem, and perhaps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of Martianism, because it made estrangement as straightforward as translation. What is the haunted apparatus? A telephone, miss. Well done. What are Caxtons? Books, sir. Splendid." 

 From "Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own/In his latest novel, the gaze of an inhuman narrator gives us a new perspective on human life, a vision that is at once deeply ordinary and profoundly strange" by James Wood (in The New Yorker).

Here's the full text of "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home."