Karen Feltz remembers that when she moved to Clarkston from the nearby Atlanta neighborhood of Five Points—a community with a vibrant nightlife and where neighbors say hello and look after one another—she was struck by the strange wariness of her neighbors. Few people talked. A sense of community was missing. It took a while, but Feltz said she came to realize that the sudden changes brought on by resettlement had simply made people afraid.
“You’re talking about one-point-one square miles of encapsulated southern ideologies,” Feltz said of her town. “People living their safe quiet lives in their white-bread houses, and all of a sudden every other person on the street is black, or Asian, or something they don’t even recognize, and ‘Oh my God, let’s just shut down and stay in our houses!’”
For all the unique circumstances of Clarkston’s transformation, there was something altogether normal about the townsfolk’s withdrawal from the public sphere. In 2007, a group of researchers led by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published a study detailing the results of surveys they had done with some thirty thousand residents of forty-one ethnically diverse communities in the United States. Their findings underscored the cost of diversity: when people have little in common, they tend to avoid each other and to keep to themselves.
“Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life,” the authors wrote, “to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”
In Clarkston, the withdrawal from collective life was matched by growing resentment at the forces and people that had caused the town to change in the first place: the resettlement agencies and the refugees. For a surprisingly long time—the better part of a decade—townsfolk kept their anger to themselves. But as resentment built, it would begin to find its expression.
“Nobody knew what to do about it, so they just sort of ignored it,” Karen Feltz said of the influx of refugees. “And that’s how we got in trouble.”
THE FIRST SIGNS of trouble surfaced in interactions between the refugees and the Clarkston Police Department in the late 1990s. The police chief at the time was a man named Charlie—or Chollie, to people in Clarkston—Nelson, an old-school presence whose office wall was adorned with a poster of Barney Fife, the goofball deputy on The Andy Griffith Show, captioned with the phrase, “Hell no, this ain’t Mayberry.”
The refugees were a constant problem, in Nelson’s eyes. They didn’t understand English. Many were poor drivers. Some, when pulled over, gesticulated and cried out, and even reached out to touch his officers—a sign of disrespect if not outright aggression to most American police officers. Nelson looked askance at diversity training and opposed offering any “special treatment” for refugees, particularly in the arena of traffic violations. Writing traffic tickets to refugees became one of Clarkston’s more reliable sources of revenue. A study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that the average Georgia town of Clarkston’s size raised about 9 percent of its budget from traffic tickets. In Clarkston, by contrast, the number was 30 percent. Nelson argued that he was simply enforcing the law. It wasn’t his fault, he said, if some refugees hadn’t learned the rules of the road in the United States. But the refugees felt singled out.
“A lot of our community members felt harassed, discriminated against,” said Salahadin Wazir, the imam of the Clarkston mosque, whose congregation was often ticketed for parking improperly around the mosque at Friday prayers. “They were all just pulled over for anything.”
Eventually, some members of the refugee community became so fed up with what they saw as harassment from Nelson’s force that they decided to act. For many, doing so meant making a leap of faith. Most had come from war-ravaged regions where the police and other authority figures were not only untrustworthy but frequently active agents of oppression. To stand up to the police in America was to take the nation’s promise of justice for all at face value. In one incident, a Somali cabdriver, after getting pulled over by a Clarkston police officer for reasons he thought bogus, summoned other cabbies from the Somali community on his CB radio. His colleagues quickly drove to the site of the police stop. The officer feared a riot might occur and let the driver off with a warning.
In 2001, Lee Swaney—a longtime city council member and a self-described champion of “old Clarkston,” that is, Clarkston before the refugees—ran for mayor. As an advocate of life as it was in a simple southern town, Swaney fit the part. The owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, he had a big walrus-y mustache and sleepy eyes that made him look older than his sixty-eight years. He drove a big white pickup truck of the sort you might expect to see on a ranch, wore cowboy boots and an American flag lapel pin, and spoke with a thick, low-country accent that betrayed his South Carolina upbringing. Swaney’s platform reflected his old-school values: he promised the citizens of Clarkston that if elected, he’d work hard to lure a good old-fashioned American hamburger joint to open up within the city limits.
A year and a half after Swaney took office, something happened that pushed the tensions in Clarkston over the edge: refugee agency officials announced that they planned to relocate some seven hundred Somali Bantu to Georgia, many of them to Clarkston.
The Somali Bantu presented an extraordinary challenge for resettlement officials. An assemblage of agricultural tribes from the area of East Africa now comprising Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique, the Somali Bantu had undergone more than three hundred years of almost uninterrupted persecution. They were kidnapped and sold into slavery with impunity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Arab slave traders. Later, under the sultanate of Zanzibar and subsequent rule by the Italian colonial government, the Somali Bantu were enslaved to work on plantations, a condition that persisted until as recently as the 1930s. When the British granted Somalia its independence in 1960, the Bantu were hounded, abused, and brutalized by ethnic Somalis. When the Somali civil war began in 1991, the persecution accelerated dramatically as warring factions forced the Somali Bantu off their land in the fertile Juba River valley. Amid the lawlessness and the systematic campaigns of rape, torture, and killing, the Somali Bantu fled en masse with other persecuted Somalis to the empty and dangerous open spaces of northeast Kenya and into four main refugee camps established there by the United Nations. By the late 1990s, the population of those camps exceeded 150,000.
This history of persecution and wandering had torn at the social fabric of the Somali Bantu and left them, on the whole, poor, deeply traumatized, and far removed from the trappings of the modern world. They had little in the way of education. Many lived their lives in primitive conditions, with no running water or electricity. Their cultural isolation was acute as well. The Somali Bantu were sometimes referred to by Somalis as the “ooji”—from the Italian word oggi, meaning “today”—for their perceived inability to think beyond the moment, a misunderstanding rooted in the different way the agrarian Somali Bantu conceived of time.
Somali Bantu slated for resettlement in the United States, it was clear, would need a great deal of help. They would need to learn English and how to fill out job applications, and they would have to acclimate themselves to the mores and expectations of the American workplace. They would have to accomplish their assimilation while somehow coping with the psychological aftermath of extreme trauma. Many Somali Bantu women had been raped, and not a few of the refugees had seen family members and fellow villagers slaughtered before their eyes. One Somali Bantu I met told me with good humor about his initial puzzlement over window blinds. Having never seen them in his time living in a windowless dwelling in Somalia or his makeshift shelter at a Kenyan refugee camp, he had no idea how they worked or what they did.
When Feltz heard this, she said, she “had a fit.”
“These people are afraid of the police to begin with,” Feltz said. “If something happened, they would never come forward and say anything. Who are they going to tell? They think everybody’s out to get them. The people they’re living with—who raped their women, stole their children, and murdered their men? Do you think they’re going to say anything? These people would be living lives of terror!”
To Feltz and many others in Clarkston, the housing plan encapsulated everything that was wrong with the way refugee resettlement was being handled in their town. The federal government didn’t provide the agencies with enough money to do the job required of them, and the agencies—in addition to lacking a basic understanding of the plights of the people they were resettling—weren’t willing to admit that they were too overwhelmed to do the job. So the refugees kept coming.
Ultimately, Feltz believed, two groups of people would pay the price for this collective failure: the refugees themselves, and the residents of Clarkston, a small town with few resources and no expertise in handling the cultural assimilation of a group of traumatized and impoverished East African farmers into the American South.
Anger over the Bantu resettlement plan prompted Mayor Swaney to act. He reached out to the heads of the agencies to see if they might be willing to answer questions from locals at a town hall meeting. The provost of Georgia Perimeter College, a community college just outside the city limits of Clarkston, agreed to provide an auditorium and to act as a moderator. And representatives from the agencies, sensing a rare opportunity to speak directly to the locals, agreed to make themselves available as well. The day before the meeting, Mayor Swaney struck a hopeful tone in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Maybe we can find a way for everybody to work together, live together, and play together,” he said.
ON THE EVENING of March 31, 2003, about a hundred and twenty Clarkston residents filed into an auditorium at Georgia Perimeter College and began to fill out index cards with questions. Agency representatives and immigration experts took their seats behind a table on stage. The provost stood to begin the question-and-answer session. He looked down at the index cards submitted from the audience. The first question was “What can we do to keep refugees from coming to Clarkston?”
The tone of the meeting scarcely improved. Residents finally gave voice to years of frustration over the resettlement process. The agency officials, taken aback by the show of hostility, became defensive. When one resident asked why the town had not been consulted in advance about the relocation of the Somali Bantu, an aid agency representative calmly reminded the crowd that this was America and the law didn’t require people to ask City Hall for permission before they rented an apartment. In truth, the agencies might have been even harsher had they not had the politics of the moment in mind. Most strongly felt that without resettlement, Clarkston would’ve been much worse off. The agencies bargained with the landlords of those big apartment complexes, demanding that they clean up and maintain their buildings and that they cut refugee families slack on deposits and first month’s rent in exchange for a steady flow of new tenants. There were already gangs, addicts, and a rougher element living in those apartments when the agencies began sending refugees to the landlords; without the refugees and the upkeep on which the agencies insisted, most in the resettlement community felt, Clarkston might have deteriorated into a slum.
Eventually, the patience of the resettlement officials and refugee advocates at the meeting wore down. Some refugee advocates in the crowd began to attack the residents as callous, and even as racist.
“Aren’t you happy you saved a life?” one refugee supporter growled at Rita Thomas, a longtime resident and civic booster of Clarkston who had spoken out against the resettlement process.
“I certainly am,” Thomas snapped. “But I would have liked for it to have been my choice.”
At the end of the evening, most in attendance felt that rather than soothing the hostility over resettlement, the meeting had congealed it. Jasmine Majid, a Georgia state official who coordinated refugee resettlement and who had been on the stage, told an Atlanta newspaper afterward that some of the questions asked at the forum “reflect a very sad and negative aspect of Clarkston.”
Locals left the meeting just as discouraged.
“It was terrible,” Karen Feltz said. “We were really trying to sort things out, and make things better. But it didn’t turn out that way.”
Chapter Four
Alone Down South
Luma Mufleh knew nothing of Clarkston or the refugees there when she moved to the nearby town of Decatur, only a few miles west of Clarkston down Ponce de Leon Avenue. Decatur was coming into its own as a liberal enclave in mostly conservative Atlanta. There was a groovy café, the Java Monkey, a bar specializing in European beer called the Brick Store Pub, and an old-school bohemian music venue called Eddie’s Attic. Luma found a job waiting tables. She made a few friends and, as if by reflex, began looking around for opportunities to coach soccer. As it happened, the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, just down the road from the old courthouse and the home of one of the oldest youth soccer programs in the state, was looking for a coach for their fourteen-and-under girls’ team. Luma applied and got the job.
Luma coached the only way she knew how—by following the example set for her by Coach Brown. She was more demanding than any of the girls or their parents expected—she made her players run for thirty-five minutes and do sets of sit-ups, push-ups, and leg lifts before each practice. And she refused to coddle them. Luma explained to her girls that they would be responsible for their actions and for meeting their obligations to the team. Players who couldn’t make practice were expected to call Luma themselves; there would be no passing off the excuse-making to Mom or Dad. Likewise, if a player had problems with the way Luma ran the team—complaints about playing time, favoritism, or the like—she would be expected to raise those concerns directly with the coach.
Luma’s approach did not sit well with all of her players’ parents. Some were mystified as to why their daughters had to run themselves to exhaustion, while others couldn’t understand why Luma punished the girls—with extra laps or time on the bench—when their parents dropped them off late for practice.
Luma’s rule-making wasn’t entirely about establishing her authority over the team—though that was part of it. She also believed that the team would benefit once individual players started to take responsibility for themselves. Luma herself had been coddled by her parents in an atmosphere of privilege and entitlement, and believed that she had paid for these comforts by sacrificing her self-reliance and independence. If Luma was going to coach, she was going to do so with this basic lesson as a backdrop, whether her players’ parents understood it right away or not. Time would tell whether her approach produced results.
“Parents would get upset about certain things she did,” said Kim Miller, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, whose daughter Maritza played on Luma’s team for three years. “They’d say, ‘
Oh—can you believe she made them run barefoot?’ or ‘Oh—can you believe she made them run laps because we were stuck in traffic?’ Luma was really tough. They had to take responsibility for what they did. If you were angry with the coach, it wasn’t ‘Go home and tell your mom.’ She didn’t want to hear from the mommies. She wanted the girls to be responsible.”
When confronted by unhappy parents, Luma displayed a confidence incongruous with her status as a newcomer, an attitude that put off some parents and intrigued others. Once when Luma ordered her players to practice barefoot to get a better feel for the soccer ball, a team mother objected on the grounds that her daughter might injure her toes.
“This is how I run my practice,” Luma told her. “If she’s not going to do it, she’s not going to play.”
During Luma’s first season as coach, her team lost every game. But over time, her methods began to pay off. Dedicated players returned, and those who didn’t buy in left. The players worked hard and improved. They stopped questioning Luma’s methods and began to absorb and intuit them. In her third season, Luma’s twelve-and-under girls’ team went undefeated and won their year-end tournament.
The players and parents who went through that experience speak about it now in near mystical terms.
“I don’t usually use this word,” said Kim Miller, Maritza’s mother. “But it was magical. She helped cultivate them and truly gave them more skills than soccer. She helped them thrive.”
Now fifteen and an active soccer player, Maritza Miller describes her time on Luma’s team as life changing. “She realized from the start that it’s not something just on the field,” Maritza said. “It’s about trust. None of my other coaches thought that way.”
Outcasts United Page 5
