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I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules.

The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was taught not to leave parties alone and not to wear miniskirts. When a woman was raped while jogging in the park at dusk, they told me not to jog in the park at dusk.

As I grew up, I learned to be nervous in the outside world. If something happened to me, out there, it would be because I had let down my guard, because I had broken a rule, because I had not had my keys out quickly enough or hadn’t crossed the street when a suspicious man started walking behind me. It would be my fault.

The funny (or not-so-funny?) thing is that the worst things usually happened to me at home. No one gave me rules to handle those eventualities, as a child or as an adult. The outside world was supposed to be the place where it was the most dangerous for me to be a woman, alone, and, yet, it is invariably at home where I have felt the most alone and the least safe.

I have been a runner, off and on, for almost ten years. One of the major obstacles to my developing a consistent running practice has been that, in my mind, there were only certain hours of the day that were safe for me to run, outside, alone. Very early morning, evening, and nighttime were too dangerous. I could prevent violence against my person by avoiding running during those times. If I ran during those times and I was accosted or raped, it would not be because a criminal attacked me, but because I had been a woman, outside, alone.

Staying inside at dawn and dusk did not prevent me from being sexually harassed by a group of men in broad daylight in the middle of a farmer’s market while pushing a baby in a stroller, or being loudly threatened by a big angry guy over a parking space on my way to an early dinner in Hayes Valley. The rules did prevent me from running during the moments I actually had time to run — early morning and late evening, when the streets were deserted and the sky was dark.

Yesterday, I set my alarm for 5:30 AM and went for my very first predawn run. I came over the stairs at Great Highway when it was still completely dark and the street was so hushed that I could hear everything: a Safeway big rig idling, lonely, almost a mile down the road, the shushing of ocean waves, my new running shoes scraping on sandy asphalt.

I had never seen the ocean, at night, alone. The water was black and pale gray, melancholy. The predawn sky was overcast. Bonfires dotted the bleak sand. Yellow streetlamps made circles of greasy light. Some people slept in their cars. No one hurt me.

Six months ago, I couldn’t walk without pain. Yesterday morning, I ran four miles in the dark. It was safe. It was good.

“Gangsta rap” came along when I was a young teen. Everything changed! There were cusses everywhere, especially this word “ho” that I repeated blithely until it occurred to me that it had nothing to do with Santa’s merriment. At first, I mocked the people who criticized this new, very popular, very open misogyny. Sometime around college, however, I realized that I was both enchanted by the music and deeply troubled by a lot of its content.

At that point, I realized rap music at large wasn’t talking to me: I was not the target audience. The self-aggrandizing lyrics, swagger and casual violence towards women were meant to invite the (male) listener to join a fellowship of powerful, desirable male peers — and to exclude me.

So why was I still listening? Why do I still listen to rap music, even now? Well, I’m not unaccustomed to being “othered” by the media I love.

Even the earliest books I read contained hints that I was not their target audience. Several Oz books contain references to Hottentots (renamed “Tottenhots” because that is clever), complete with unflattering illustrations:

Tottenhot! Get it?

In case we were confused about Baum’s feelings concerning the “Tottenhot,” this particular image illustrates a storyline in which Glinda the Witch has to put an animal through a succession of transformations, each time bringing him closer to humanity. “Tottenhot” is two transformations removed from a human being.

I definitely remember having seen these images, decades later; they have since been expurgated from more recent editions, causing something of a controversy in the “Oz community.” (You can see the other scanned pages at the link.)

Meanwhile, the author who continued the Oz series after Baum’s death, Ruth Plumly Thompson, added a popular character, Jinnicky, the Red Jinn, to the stories. Jinnicky  is served by a cast of chubby black slaves. At one point, a rebellion among the Red Jinn’s slaves is actually suppressed by Princess Ozma.

And then there was the first time of many I read through Little Town on the Prairie and fetched up against the charcoal drawing of Pa Ingalls and three friends in blackface (Wilder refers to them as “darkies”). Again, I remember this cognitive dissonance. I didn’t ask an adult what was going on; I didn’t even know what blackface was. I only knew that there was something creepy about Pa dusting his face with soot and speaking in a fake black vernacular.
Once I moved on to my ten-year Sherlock Holmes obsession, I learned pretty quickly to avoid the latter-day mystery  “The Three Gables”:

The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.

“Which of you gen’l'men is Masser Holmes?” he asked.

Holmes raised his pipe with a languid smile.

“Oh! it’s you, is it?” said our visitor, coming with an unpleasant, stealthy step round the angle of the table. “See here, Masser Holmes, you keep your hands out of other folks’ business. Leave folks to manage their own affairs. Got that, Masser Holmes?”

“Keep on talking,” said Holmes. “It’s fine.”

“Oh! it’s fine, is it?” growled the savage. “It won’t be so damn fine if I have to trim you up a bit. I’ve handled your kind before now, and they didn’t look fine when I was through with them. Look at that, Masser Holmes!”

He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. Holmes examined it closely with an air of great interest.

“Were you born so?” he asked. “Or did it come by degrees?”

It’s actually really hard for me to read this quote, given how many of my junior high school daydreams took part in the Victorian London Holmes inhabited. Now, let’s be honest: that world was not racially inclusive. There are plenty of other racist assumptions in the Holmes canon — the Welsh are dark and emotional, the Southern Europeans border on hysteria both comic and murderous, Indians are invariably shady and the poor are either noble or felonious.

I suppose it’s that the black buffoon Doyle serves up is alarmingly similar to the sort of Stepin Fetchery that’s still on offer today — and still just as offensive. I knew, by the age of eleven or twelve, that I was supposed to be offended by that. Instead, I remember feeling ashamed. I wonder if the shame stemmed from this proof I was unworthy of participating in my Victorian fantasy?

I can’t answer that honestly from an adult perspective. All I know is that, despite knowing most Holmes stories practically by heart, I could not tell you what happens in The Three Gables if you put a gun to my head; one of my favorite Holmes stories was “The Yellow Face,” in which the truth about an interracial marriage comes out, without negative consequences; and that for some reason I have spent the last thirteen months building a Victorian alternate universe in which people of all hues mix pretty freely. Hmm!

The point of all these sad little vignettes, I suppose, is to prove that I’m well accustomed to the point at which an author waves me aside, saying, in effect, “I’m not talking to you.” I rail against it, but I can’t say it never happens, even today. However, I can’t just stop reading books, or only reading the books that make me feel great about myself. Some of the best and most important books were and are written by people with really backwards notions of race and gender. That doesn’t discount the fact that these books are good or important.

In the same vein, when rap is good, it’s very good. For every time Kanye West rails against gold-digging baby mamas

18 years, 18 years/ and on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his

he also produces something like the last verse of “Gone,” perhaps my favorite set of Kanye rhymes –

What the summer of the Chi got to offer a 18-year-old/sell drugs or get a job, you gotta play your role/my dog worked at Taco Bell, hooked us up plural/fired a week later, the manager countin’ churros/sometimes I can’t believe it when I look up in the mirro’/how we out in Europe, spendin’ Euros

Kanye rapping ridiculous pop culture things (churros) with real-world things (Euros) never fails to make me smile.

Of course I’m against misogyny in music, of course I constantly question the relationship between the misogyny of rap music and the culture of violent sexism among young people. (I also am against the use of the word “Hottentot” outside a critical discussion of the media’s obsession with Black women’s bodies!) But I’m not going to stop listening to all rap music, any more than I’m going to torch my Oz books.

I avoid music that is actively vile, just as I avoid books that are consciously attempting to be racist. I try to find mainstream rappers who are doing something a little different from the norm, whether musically or lyrically. (Yes, Mos Def, I know, thanks. :) I get excited when a new female MC appears, then get disappointed when, almost inevitably, everyone loses interest in the “novelty.”

I wince, when an otherwise fantastic rapper describes his coterie of willing groupies in the same verse in which he enumerates his other possessions, because I know he’s talking over my head to the men in the room. But I keep listening.

Part of it, I know, is merely old age: when I was a child, every Wham! “Last Christmas” or NKOTB “Funky Christmas” brought me closer to an obscene quantity of disposable plastic toys. By the time my grandparents started playing decent Christmas music on Christmas Eve, my sister and I were in a Mattel-stoked frenzy, one step away from an infant Altamont.

These days, however, Hanukkah tends to show up weeks before actual Christmas, so after I have disappointed my children with eight nights of beautiful handcrafted wooden toys, educational books, and afterschool lessons, and permitted my husband to make the obligatory epic kitchen-destroying latke dinner, we still have up to a month of Sisqo’s “Perfect Christmas” to go.

A month is a long time.

The heart of the problem, of course, is that every single human who has ever entered a recording studio has laid down at least one Christmas track. Matisyahu probably has a cover of Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer (available only on mixtape, obvs). And, according to the best available empirical evidence, at least 99.2% of these songs are objectively terrible (you cannot argue with science). There are certain songs, even among this crowd of terrible music, that make me cringe, sprinting for the door of Bath & Body Works with the complete Mangosteen Cloud Aromatherapy Set still in my basket, swerving my 1998 Nissan Maxima across several lanes of traffic in an effort to turn the radio station.

These are the Four Worst Christmas Songs.

They are not obscure songs. No, they are popular, classic songs that play without cease during the holiday season. They are everywhere: in the gym, at the dentist’s, lodged deep in my damaged brain. And they are all very bad, each in its own way.

4. Jackson 5 – I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

Worst lyric: “I saw Mommy tickle Santa Claus / underneath his beard so snowy white.”

The Jackson 5 are among my very favorite groups. It is not their fault that “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is a sad song, sung in the most upbeat manner possible, in which a child discovers that his mother is carrying on a torrid and illicit extramarital affair with Father Christmas.

But it is. And knowing what we know about Joe, the Jackson paterfamilias – and the fact that, as Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jacksons weren’t even allowed to celebrate Christmas (so what on earth was their mother doing with Santa?) — only makes the song sadder.

3. Michael Bolton – “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”

Worst lyric: anything that Michael Bolton is “singing”

Admittedly, criticizing any Michael Bolton song is shooting 1992 Christmas fish in a 2009 holiday barrel. But part of the reason Christmas music, as a group, is so horrible is that people feel the need to play Every Single Available Christmas Track in an effort not to be repetitive. This leads to a long, long playlist of predictably horrible music, and the inevitable Michael Bolton Christmas carol.

Ironically, the Jackson 5 cover of this song — upbeat and imbued with the genuine excitement small children feel for the approach of Santa Claus — is among my favorite Christmas covers.

This particular song hits all the Michael Bolton bullet points — unnecessary grit and grinding on the very lightest possible subject matter; cringeworthy faux soul; inducing a rage stroke in the endless checkout line at Michael’s — within an internally consistent framework of general suckitude.

2. Paul McCartney: “Wonderful Christmas Time”

Worst lyric: “Simply having a wonderful Christmastime / Simply having a wonderful Christmastime.”

This song’s thesis statement is as follows: “we are sitting around together, not doing much, just having a pretty decent Christmas. Repeat.” Okay, Paul. I know your highs are very high highs, but really?

I remember the very first time I heard this song. It was a VH1 Pop-Up Video Christmas-themed episode. My face looked exactly like this:  (O_0) . Now when I hear the song my face looks exactly like this  (>_<) .

This song represents what it must have been like to be John Lennon in 1967, trying to keep Paul the hell out of A Day In The Life. This song is Manic to John’s Depression. If I could leave with Yoko Ono, I would, too.

1. Eartha Kitt – “Santa Baby”

“Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing, a ring /I don’t mean a phone”

The recently departed Eartha Kitt was awesome for a million reasons I will not list here. This song is not awesome, and I hear it more than any other bad Christmas song, year after year.

This song is, as far as I can tell, sung from the perspective of a gold-digger to her sugar daddy, except the gold digger is Eartha Kitt and the sugar daddy is…Santa? (What is with the prevalence of women having relations with Santa Claus on or around Christmas? I thought he was married.) The song oozes with promised sexual returns to any bearded jolly-belly rich enough to shimmy down the chimney with a yacht and some diamonds.

It is a great song to play for your daughter.

I mean, she can’t expect to get that Easy-Bake Oven without putting out a little.

She created the enduringly charming children’s characters Little Grey Rabbit and Fuzzypeg the Hedgehog but the private diaries of Alison Uttley reveal the author to have been a controlling, difficult woman who despised many people, including her near neighbour Enid Blyton whom she called a “vulgar, curled woman” (The Guardian).

I was not shocked by this, but that is because I recently picked up a stack of Uttley’s books at Savers.

Every evening this week, my son has walked over to the bookcase in his room and selected the next book in the Gray Rabbit series for me to read at bedtime. Every evening, I read a lengthy and meandering story about how a few well-meaning but daft animals spent a regular day in their lives, rendered in excruciating detail:

Grey Rabbit sat at her cottage door one fine morning with her work-basket at her side and the scissors on the doorstep. She was making a night-cap for Mrs. Hedgehog out of a little pink handkerchief. Hare had picked it up on the common, dropped from somebody’s pocket. Grey Rabbit decided it was just right for a night-cap. She snipped the edge neatly and sewed a hem, shaping it to fit Mrs. Hedgehog’s head. Her little needle flew in and out of the linen and her stitches were so small they were almost invisible (Little Grey Rabbit Makes Lace).

Are you still awake? My son isn’t. And these are the opening lines of the story. This is the hook that is supposed to keep the reader turning pages. This is an accurate synopsis of the 62-page book:  Grey Rabbit is sewing a night-cap. Grey Rabbit wants to finish the night-cap with lace. She does not know how to make lace. Eventually she will make lace. I no longer need ply my son with Benadryl on flimsy excuses. He sleeps the deep sleep of the profoundly bored.

Grey Rabbit and her friends, Hare and Squirrel, live in a two-story house near a farm, where they serve as the social and emotional center of their anthropomorphic animal community. Whereas, in Beatrix Potter, the stories underlying the community are often dark — the story, for example, where enraged mice trash a dollhouse because it turns out the food on the table is fake — in Uttley’s works, there really aren’t any stories, just a bunch of animals hanging around washing clothes and making lace.

Are the works classist? Of course they are. Classic English literature for children is always about reinforcing the status quo, whether Beatrix Potter or Tolkien (there’s an excellent and very funny essay about Lord of the Rings that brilliantly tears Tolkien to pieces on this and other points.) Most children’s literature is. We’re not raising revolutionaries; we’re educating them about how their society works and where they fit into it.

(In classic American children’s literature, for example, we teach children that if you give and give without asking anything in return, all that will remain of you is a sad stump in a forest, and that, when your parents leave you at home, you should never admit manic felines who obviously follow the Grateful Dead and own many Phish albums, especially if a talking goldfish warns you not to. No hippies!)

No, my criticism of Uttley’s Grey Rabbit series is not that they advance a very specific class consciousness — with stern, paternalistic Owl, essentially the Lord of the Manor, at the top of the pecking order; Grey Rabbit’s household as comfortable country squires; Hedgehog the milkman, with his inexplicable broad accent, playing the faithful peasant; and characters like the “gipsy rabbit”, who “was very brown, and her hair was rough and tousled, with thorns and leaves sticking in it,” and is unquestionably the rabbit equivalent of a Magic Negro.

Can you guess what Grey Rabbit is making? SPOILER ALERT it is lace.

Nor is it that it is possible that a person who wrote books for children hated not just children, but everyone she knew, and was consumed by loathing for people like her illustrators (who, I am sure, dreamt of doing something grander than coloring pictures for a mean lady of rabbits making lace). She also bristled with jealousy of Beatrix Potter and Enid Blighton, female contemporaries who were far better writers.

Imagine that. A woman, who should have been nice in real life, was not! Though no one ever said Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie were nice. [Perhaps Lewis Carroll is a bad example :'( . And J.M. Barrie was not rumored to be mean, but weird.]

No, it is that they are boring, and that I cannot forgive, because there are tons and tons of beautiful, hilarious, fascinating, educational books for children that are amusing to read, and I am trapped reading these instead.

But they are peerless at putting children to sleep.

P.S. The worst part is: I actually like making lace.

I read an interesting post on Racialicious last week, from the point of view of an MFA student who has realized that writers of color are, largely, not being taught to new practitioners of the craft. Even blockbuster authors like Toni Morrison are relegated to Ethnic Studies curricula:

To me it feels like writers of colour are being made homecoming queen, but never getting invited to a single party.  Lit of colour is celebrated in the awards circle, yet its continuing ghettoisation despite the prizes is puzzling and depressing.

Is the literary colour divide wider than we thought?

This is certainly food for thought. It’s one thing (a great thing!) to win awards and sell novels. It’s another thing entirely to be, as the author puts it, “ghettoized”. Very telling was a conversation she relates:

In conversation with Mat Johnson earlier this year, he told me that he likes teaching at VONA* because he feels that sometimes writers of colour don’t get as much out of creative writing workshops as their non-POC peers. This is because the level of critique they get from said peers is thin, Johnson says, with the justification that people are loathe to critique writing that describes an experience they themselves haven’t had.

This really, really threw me for a loop. This is advanced as a reason not to read or critique writing by authors of color — because the reader hasn’t shared the author’s experience?

Do some people only read books that confirm their own experiences and world views? Of course. But it’s just lazy to assume that a book can’t possibly jibe with one’s own experience just because the author is not exactly like the reader.

Case in point: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It begins in a Dominican-American family in the 1970s, and weaves in and out of time, place, and perspective. I have no personal connections to that community, and yet I could not shake the feeling that Diaz was telling huge chunks of my own story.

But I really don’t need to come up with specific examples, do I? Because the argument that books by writers from other cultures are inaccessible is a flimsy excuse for exclusion. After all, there are entire genres that depend on creating a world within a completely alien culture. (See: science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, et cetera.) Also…AARGH!