Analysis Of Outcasts United

I wish to submit an essay entitled “A Refugee’s Inescapable Trials and Tribulations” for consideration in the Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference Essay Contest.

In the essay, I answer the question “What are some of the inherent cultural barriers and challenges that the refugees faced when coming to Clarkston? Are these challenges unique to this story or do they reflect the broader concerns and anxieties about immigration in America?” with supporting evidence from the book and outside sources.

My essay focuses on discrimination as one of the main challenges that refugees face. I discuss some instances of discrimination that occurred in the book, whether based on race or culture,

Having been ripped from their world by violence and chaos, refugees find themselves adrift in a completely different realm. To clearly observe such a struggle, look no further than Clarkston, Georgia, and the works of author Warren St. John. In John’s novel Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference, the challenges of refugees in Clarkston are chronicled and encountered in many ways, including discrimination and bias from other races and cultures, inadequate English education in the past and present, and the desire to belong in a world refugees are not sure they fit

Most people want to feel like they fit in, but for refugees and immigrants, that feeling was even more important. “Young refugees and immigrants... were caught between the world of their parents and the new world of their friends and schoolmates” (105) and had to choose whether they would vie for the approval of their peers or their family. One young boy on the Fugees soccer team refused to cut his hair because his peers thought it was cool, and ended up being kicked off the team (111). Other young refugees in Clarkston gave in to the allure of gangs, and ended up in a cycle of violence and crime, just for a sense of belonging and safety. “Gangs… promised both belonging and status”(105) and provided a way to become American, despite all the trouble and anguish they put their members in. As adolescents between worlds, young immigrants experience a heightened sense of liminality, when a person “becomes neither here nor there” (221), and struggle with finding out who they are and where they