Outcasts United: The Story Of A Refugee Soccer Team That Changed A Town, by Warren St. John

This book was referred to me by a coworker who was assigned the book in a college course, and figured I would appreciate it. On the surface, this is a feel-good story about a tough female Jordanian-American soccer coach named Luma encouraging a mélange of refugee children in an obscure Atlanta suburb to succeed as a team despite the immense difficulties of their lives. On the other hand, when one realizes that this story was written by a New York Times reporter, and details a rather unpleasant picture of the way that leftist elites seek to target areas for social experimentation, and how the presence of impoverished refugees, often from broken families, drastically increase the social costs and crime rates of the places where they are congregated for reasons of convenience, and the way that the author speaks with scorn about the desire of the town’s mayor to preserve its well-being despite being overrun by unwanted immigrants, there are clearly two sides to this story. If St. John is most interested in painting the resilience of the refugees and their coach, the unwanted social changes in the city as the result of such a high refugee population certainly is a cautionary tale in contemporary social experimentation from on high.

In terms of its contents and structure, the book is a rather straightforward narrative history, focusing on emotional sob stories and the course of a soccer season for three teams of refugee teenagers from the town of Clarkston, Georgia. There is the tough, undemonstrative coach, a Jordanian-American from an aristocratic family whose family cut her off when she wanted to continue enjoying the freedoms of the United States rather than returning to Jordan after graduating college, a social entrepreneur with a passion for sports. There are numerous other features of immigrants from Burundi, Liberia, Sudan, Kosovo, and other places, whose concentration in Clarkston is the result of convenience and an overabundance of cheap housing. The book talks about the poor conditions of the team, about the lures of gangs, about problems in education, and there is an overall leftist bias that we should be doing more to help such people—a point that is made explicit towards the end when the author comments that Luma isn’t a hero, and that her example is worthy of emulation.

Yet the title itself is somehow a bit of a stretch. To be sure, the people involved in this story are outcasts. Whether we are talking about the coach or the players, they are all misfits in Georgia society. Luma even misses a game because she is arrested on some sort of driving offense, and the author makes it appear as if the arrest was racially and culturally motivated, a slur on the honor and integrity of the local population. And the outcasts are not even united [1], rather they are often divided by ethnoreligious means and keep in their cliques. It takes a great deal of effort, and a shared love of soccer, for the refugees to even function as a team, much less on a social basis. This is a book that presents a multi-cultural view of a town where immigrants seek to be welcomed, but the only success stories that the book ends up showing are among those who are highly assimilated as a result of learning English and being acculturated. The book is also a prime example of the reasons why intact families are a good idea, given the difficulties faced by the families discussed here, and the lack of people there are to cheer on the team’s efforts. Despite the intent of the author to make a heartwarming tale of ragamuffin outsiders, the result is a sad tale of postmodern social decline and the negative side of social idealism.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/lahu-rak-lahu-karen-rak-karen-farang-rak-farang/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/from-one-hill-tribe-to-another/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/you-dont-have-to-live-like-a-refugee/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/on-the-mae-surin-refugee-camp/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/into-the-refugee-camps/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/a-settled-home-for-the-refugees/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/book-review-blockaders-refugees-contrabands/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/it-could-happen-to-you/