Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience Theme Analysis

Outcasts United tells the story of the Fugees, a boys’ soccer team in Clarkston, Georgia. The team is started by Luma al-Mufleh, a young Jordanian woman who creates the team as a free program for the many young refugee children in Clarkston. Over the 1990s and 2000s, Clarkston became a prime location for international organizations to resettle refugees from around the globe. The boys on the Fugees team faced hardships in their home countries, often due to discrimination based on their race, religion, or ethnic group. But St. John demonstrates that just because the Fugees and their families are able to immigrate to America does not mean that they have fully escaped discrimination: they still face prejudice and hardship due to their status as refugees. Still, despite their past struggles and the resistance that the town of Clarkston has to the presence of refugees, St. John also depicts the enormous amount of resilience that the Fugees bear in the face of these challenges—even though it is unfair that they have to face such discrimination in the first place.

Many of the Fugees are escaping countries locked in civil wars, trapped by fighting between rival ethnic groups. St. John provides several examples of the conflicts the boys are escaping. Beatrice Ziaty and her sons, Jeremiah, Mandela, and Darlington, escape civil war in Monrovia, Liberia. Beatrice hid with her sons and husband in their home as battles raged outside. She then watched her husband killed by soldiers for money. Despite this tragedy and their lack of resources, she and her children then walked for ten days to the Ivory Coast and arrived at an overflowing refugee camp. They built a mud hut for shelter in the camp and applied for resettlement with the U.N, demonstrating their commitment to survival despite their persecution. Bienvenue Ntwari arrives with his brothers Alex and Ive, his sister Alyah, and his mother Generose, from Burundi. They had fled because of civil war in Burundi between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups. This civil war lasted ten years, resulting in the deaths of 300,000 people. Generose, who was Tutsi, fled the country. She and her children wait for four years in a refugee camp in Mozambique before being resettled in the U.S. These and other examples serve to illustrate the harm of racial and ethnic divisions, but also the strength within the Fugees and their families as they try to search elsewhere to rebuild their lives.

Yet even once the families reach the U.S., they still face forms of discrimination and must work extremely hard to keep their families afloat. A few months after Beatrice and her sons arrive in Georgia, Beatrice is mugged coming home from her new job. St. John implies that she is targeted because of her refugee status, because she is vulnerable and doesn’t know how to call the police and hasn’t yet built relationships with her neighbors, or anyone living in the U.S. Thus, not only do they receive very little support in their new home, but their status as refugees also makes them especially vulnerable to people taking advantage of them. Still, Beatrice simply instructs her boys to remain inside when she goes to work, knowing that remaining strong and stoic is the only way she can combat this kind of targeting. Similarly, Generose must find ways to keep her family afloat. Her husband could not get immigration papers to the U.S. and so lives in Canada and sends money to them. Generose must take a night job so that she can then leave her six-month-old daughter Alyah in the care of her fifteen, thirteen, and seven-year-old children. Like other refugee kids, Bien and his family bear extra responsibility and the burden of adapting to life in a new country with very little money—just one example of the unfair circumstances to which these children are subject.

In the face of these mass resettlements, the town of Clarkston is often discriminatory against the refugees. Middle-class white families who have lived in Clarkston for a long time are put off by the arrival of the refugees in the 1990s and 2000s.  They start to withdraw from their neighbors, fearing the arrival of the refugees. They elect a man named Lee Swaney as mayor, who campaigns on the idea that he is a champion of “old Clarkston”—that is, Clarkston before the refugees’ arrival. The fact that Swaney wins the election reflects the values and mindsets of the people of Clarkston. Refugees often feel targeted by the police: when police use the refugees’ frequent traffic violations as a reliable source of revenue for the town, the refugees become understandably upset. This tension escalates until when one cab driver is stopped by the police for what he believes is no reason, he calls in backup from other cab drivers and the police, fearing a riot, lets him off with a warning. Thus, the refugees find their own ways to cope with some of the injustices that they face. The struggle that the Fugees have in finding a field to call home is representative of the fact that even though the refugees have been resettled in Clarkston, they are not necessarily welcome there—St. John even refers to the “hostility” they face from opposing teams from other towns who “[resent] the newcomers.” When Luma tries to find a field for the Fugees to practice on, it initiates a long conflict between Luma and city officials who are reluctant to give a group of refugees free reign of a field. Sometimes they allow the Fugees to play on nice, unused fields, and sometimes they are relegated to a “rutted, gravelly field” covered with broken glass and no soccer goals. In spite of the challenges they face with the town, the boys never complain about their situation. They recognize their fortune in being able to play on the team at all. Even though the Fugees, and the refugee community as a whole, experience prejudice and a lack of support, all they can do is face those challenges and adapt to them.