Outcasts United

by

Warren St. John

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Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience Theme Icon
Community and Teamwork vs. Division Theme Icon
Leadership and Respect Theme Icon
Discipline, Dedication, and Success Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Outcasts United, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience Theme Icon

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.

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Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience Quotes in Outcasts United

Below you will find the important quotes in Outcasts United related to the theme of Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience.
Introduction Quotes

In fact, things with the Fugees were more fragile than I could have realized that day. The team had no home field. The players’ private lives were an intense daily struggle to stay afloat. They and their families had fled violence and chaos and found themselves in a place with a completely different set of values and customs.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Luma al-Mufleh
Related Symbols: Fields
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

The incident robbed Beatrice of the hope her family would be safe in her new home. She became obsessed with her boys’ safety. In Liberia, a neighbor would always look after her kids if she needed to leave them to run an errand or visit a friend. But Beatrice didn’t know anyone in Clarkston.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Mandela Ziaty, Beatrice Ziaty, Darlington Ziaty, Jeremiah Ziaty
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member who called himself a champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Mayor Lee Swaney
Related Symbols: Fields
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Luma also felt that if a soccer team of well-to-do sub urban kids was assigned to play on a field of sand and broken glass, their parents would call the team’s sponsors or the league—someone—to protest. The parents of the Fugees’ players were seen as powerless, she believed, so no one thought much about making the team play on such a bad field.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Luma al-Mufleh
Related Symbols: Fields
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

With no siblings in the United States, and a guardian who was hardly ever home, Kanue began to view the team as his family. “The Fugees—it’s really important to me,” he said. “When I play on that team, I’m with my brothers.”

Related Characters: Kanue Biah (speaker), Warren St. John (speaker), Luma al-Mufleh, Barlea
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

Swaney’s proposal changed the energy in the room. The council’s questions became gentler. They talked among themselves and agreed that six months sounded like a reasonable amount of time for a trial period.

There was a motion, and a second.

The motion passed unanimously. Luma nodded in thanks and stifled a smile. The Fugees, for now at least, had a home.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Luma al-Mufleh, Mayor Lee Swaney
Related Symbols: Fields
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

Robin calmed down at school and became outgoing with his teammates. Idwar, still quiet and shy, became a confident young man on the field. Soccer, Shamsoun said, kept the boys sane.

“It kept our minds from thinking about what happened,” he said. “We made friends—kids from different cultures. It broadened our minds, and we weren’t the only ones going through hard times. That’s why the team is so close. It became our family.”

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Shamsoun Dikori (speaker), Idwar Dikori, Robin Dikori
Page Number: 178
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

Pull back farther, and you got a sense of where Clarkston sat in America—tucked in a green corner of the country beneath the gray ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pull back again, and the blue oceans came into view, then other continents and countries—Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—all looking deceptively calm. Pull back farther still and the curved horizons of the planet revealed themselves—a beautiful ball of green, white, blue, slate, and brown. Someday, somewhere down there, the Fugees would find a home.

Related Characters: Warren St. John (speaker), Luma al-Mufleh, Mayor Lee Swaney
Related Symbols: Fields
Page Number: 218-219
Explanation and Analysis: