Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman's Quest to Make a Difference

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2009

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Value of Organized Sports for Young People

The story of the Fugees demonstrates that organized sports can provide young people with a safe space to explore their identities while also providing a motivation for education and better behavior. St. John suggests that organized sports can benefit children from all walks of life, but centering his narrative on the Fugees’ experiences allows him to highlight organized sports as a community-building tool to support refugee young people and their families.

For many refugee families in Clarkston, the safety provided by participation in the Fugees becomes the team’s number one benefit. While watching the team practice for the first time, St. John observes “a palpable sense of trust and camaraderie between the players and their coach” (6). This trust extends to the Fugees’ families. Before Beatrice Ziaty agrees to let her sons play for the Fugees, she questions Luma extensively about the team’s safety protocols. Only after “Luma promise[s] to pick Jeremiah up before practice and to drop him off afterward” does Beatrice finally agree (57). Ultimately, St. John suggests that the Fugees’ families “[understand] that soccer with Luma [is] safe, unlike the games in the parking lots of the apartment complexes, which often [take] place in the menacing presence of drug dealers” (102). The emphasis on safety in these excerpts highlights one important benefit of organized sports for young people: providing them with a safe space, adult mentorship, and support to avoid dangerous situations.

Crucially, the Fugees soccer team is not only a safe space but also a space where refugee young people can explore their identities and heal their trauma in a supported environment. An essential part of Luma’s coaching strategy is her hands-off approach: “[O]nce the whistle blew, she allowed her players to be themselves: to screw up, to take chances, and to create” (4). Giving the boys space to explore and take chances ultimately results in intense emotional growth. Although Luma personally believes that soccer “should be a place where they [can] leave all that behind” (58), many of the Fugees use soccer practice to discuss their most painful and difficult past experiences. As they learn to trust Luma, the boys “reveal specifics about their experiences in ways that underscore[] the lingering effects of those traumas” (58). Because the boys feel that Luma “cares about [them] like she’s [their] parent” (112), they are able to grow and heal emotionally in Fugees practice.

Finally, St. John shows that organized sports can be a powerful motivator for students to excel academically. Knowing that “the game and her team [can] be an enticement for after school tutoring that might give young refugees a better chance to succeed” (59), Luma requires tutoring of all her athletes. She also “forb[ids] boys like Grace and Bien from speaking to each other in Swahili” to encourage the improvement of their English (76), which she knows will benefit them in school and provide them with greater ease in the Clarkston community. The book suggests a clear, mutually beneficial relationship between organized sports and education for young people—implying that success in one will improve their performance in the other.

The Systemic Obstacles Facing Refugees in the United States

Throughout the book, St. John highlights the systemic obstacles facing refugees in the United States to underscore a broader discussion of implicit racial, xenophobic, and socioeconomic bias in the United States defined by proximity to whiteness and wealth. The town of Clarkston acts as a useful microcosm of the nation as a whole. St. John positions the challenges faced by refugees in Clarkston as evidence of larger systemic obstacles. St. John suggests that these obstacles can come in the form of indifference or outright violence and that both explicit and implicit forms of racism and xenophobia harm the community. The author provides a key example of indifference-as-obstacle in the treatment of the Fugees by their sponsors at the Decatur-Dekalb YMCA. Although the YMCA “had received a $9,100 grant to supply the Fugees with unforms, equipment, and goals” (114), the Fugees play an entire season with no goalposts on their practice field. Although Luma spends time researching inexpensive but quality leather shoes for the team and shares the information with the YMCA, officials thoughtlessly order “cheap plastic shoes,” and the Fugees “pay the price with their blistered feet” (150). Most tellingly, the bus that the YMCA loans the team to transport players to and from practice fails to appear twice in one week, forcing Luma to drive the team home, four players at a time, in her personal car. St. John explicitly states that “the YMCA would never simply forget to send a bus to take home the well-to-do American kids in its other athletic programs” (150). The YMCA’s disregard for the Fugees—despite the massive grant they were awarded specifically to support the team—provides evidence of indifference as a key systemic obstacle refugees face in the United States.

Another, more malicious obstacle faced by refugees in the United States is systemic violence in the justice system. In Outcasts United, St. John highlights the story of police officer Timothy Jordan, who “had been fired from another police force in the area for excessive use of force” and was found unfit for service “because of his volatile temper” (81-82). Although Jordan informed Clarkston officials about his past, he was still hired. In January 2006, Jordan violently assaulted a Nigerian refugee named Chike Chime during a routine traffic stop. Jordan was later removed from the force, but St. John asserts that the fact that he was hired in the first place evidences the systemic violence in the justice system, which disproportionally targets refugees and immigrants.

The Influence of American Politics on International Conflicts

Outcasts United centers the stories of refugees from various nations trying to make a new life in the United States. Throughout the book, St. John provides detailed histories of the conflicts that necessitated the resettlement of the Fugees’ players and their families in the United States. In crafting these histories, St. John explicitly identifies the American political actions and impulses that influenced these international conflicts. The inclusion of these histories acts as a reminder to St. John’s primarily American audience that the politics and practices of the United States government can have a profound impact on people across the world. St. John subtly suggests that because American political and economic concerns both directly and indirectly exacerbate conflicts abroad, the United States has a moral obligation to support refugees from other countries.

In Chapter 2, St. John uses the history of violence in Liberia as evidence of the entanglement of American politics and international conflict. Liberia began in the 19th century as a project of the American Colonization Society, a group of white Americans who believed that formerly enslaved Black people would be more successful in Africa than in America. Approximately 18,000 formerly enslaved and freeborn Black Americans settled in Liberia in the 19th century, declaring independence in 1847. The descendants of these settlers, “backed by the U.S. Government” (27), ruled Liberia with little concern for native peoples until 1980, when an ethnically Krahn man named Samuel Doe led a successful coup and became the first non-Americo-Liberian president. When Doe took power, the Krahn people “essentially replaced the Americo-Liberians as an American-backed oppressive ruling elite” (27). The resulting civil war killed approximately 200,000 people and displaced half of the country’s residents. St. John’s emphasis on America’s role in supporting oppressive leaders suggests that the United States bears some culpability in the civil war. Pairing this history with the personal story of the Ziaty family, St. John suggests that the United States government has a moral obligation to support Liberian refugees.

Chapter 22, similarly, describes the deadly effects of American intervention in Kosovo. Qendrim Bushi and his family were living in Kacanik, Kosovo when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), on President Clinton’s order, bombed the region to prompt the withdrawal of antagonistic Serb forces. In order to “avenge the military intervention,” the ethnically Serbian president “unleashed a wave of destruction and brutality on some sixty towns and cities in Kosovo” (204), including Kacanik. Again, St. John lays out the specific political actions of the United States government that demonstrate America’s culpability for the violence and resulting displacement in Kosovo.