With the folk memory of the dark, rascist days of Great Britain in the 1960s and 1970s hard-wired in from before I was born, my brain said, “How dare you!?”, immediately followed up with, “You little bastard”. The question is, are these types of conversations actually working to minimize hate? These days, people want their conflicts right out there in the open. This is the current landscape of 2011, a far cry from the days where politically correct labels were slapped on to anything in order to minimize conflict. Though there has been considerable backlash about what is politically correct and incorrect to say in our culture, the constant influx of these type of insult matches demonstrates how often discussions about racism, sexism, orany other “ism” end with piled on insults and relying on hurtful stereotypes in order to shame the other. Though the rage that Wallace provoked was certainly merited, as noted on blogs like Racialicious and Colorlines, the use of equally appalling slurs to shame her begs the question of what kind of dialogue we aim to promote in our current culture. Most of these insults drew attention to her cleavage and the fact that she was a “stupid, slutty little white girl”, rather than a bigot. Tons of insulted students of all races, creeds and genders logged online to insult her back, oftentimes relying on racist and sexist stereotypes designed to insult and intimidate. “Ching Chong, Ting Tong, Ling Long” she sneers, holding an imaginary phone up to her ear) the response was venomous. When Alexandra Wallace posted a YouTube video of herself complaining about the “hordes” of Asian students at UCLA and how their existence on campus interfered with her student performance (in the video Wallace mocks the way Asian students speak on their cell phones in the library. The customers and staff were the most desperate and hopeless people I ever knew. Poundland was a place people joked about and avoided at all costs… both as a place to work and to shop.
It was one of the few places that actually paid the minimum wage. Jobs were hard to come by in Dundee and Poundland was the lowest of the low. The only job I could find, though, was at Poundland, and I only got that because my flatmate worked there. Over the summer I had for the first time in my life become accustomed to having money, and I had made the decision to work weekends during my final year so that it would be the first I didn’t spend in poverty.
Andrews and returned to Dundee for my final year of university. It began in the summer of 2007, when I finished working at a hotel in St. It was called Poundland and it was about a year I spent working at a single-price retailer. It was a true story told in the third person, with all the names changed but the same events and surroundings. The first “novel” I ever finished writing wasn’t really a novel at all.