Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Some officers, particularly white ones, thought that with his constant write-ups, Scipio was singling them out for discipline because of their race. Some saw themselves as pawns in a broader scheme by Scipio to paint himself as a reformer to bolster a possible run for sheriff. One of the white officers who thought Scipio was engaging in something like reverse discrimination was Timothy Jordan, the cop who had arrested Chike Chime and who had been hired by Nelson before Scipio took over as police chief. In his first few months on the job, Scipio and Jordan had already clashed. Scipio wrote up Jordan for an incident Jordan maintained was a harmless prank—he’d hung some plastic toy guns on the locker of a fellow officer with whom he had a series of running gags. Jordan didn’t like Scipio’s approach to dealing with refugees either. They were in America, Jordan believed, and they, not the police, should be the ones adjusting to new customs.

  After Jordan arrested and beat Chike Chime, the Nigerian immigrant, Scipio decided to review the video of the arrest from the camera mounted on the dashboard of Jordan’s police cruiser. When Scipio viewed the video, Chime was still languishing in the DeKalb County Jail, four days after his arrest. As he viewed the video, Scipio was shocked at what he saw. Not only had Jordan not treated Chime with the requisite courtesy, professionalism, and respect; he had plainly brutalized Chime with the metal flashlight. Scipio called the local district attorney and brought in outside law enforcement officials to review the tape. Then he went to the DeKalb County Jail.

  Chime was surprised to hear that he had a visitor, and shocked to see that it was the Clarkston chief of police. What he heard from Scipio proved even more surprising. Scipio apologized to Chime for the way he had been treated. The chief added that he’d found the arrest video, as he put it, “strange,” and said he was turning the tape over to investigators. Scipio then told Chime he was free to leave the jail. A few days later, Chime received a call letting him know that all charges against him had been dropped, and further, that Officer Jordan had been fired and arrested for the beating.

  Chime, like any well-adjusted American, soon hired a lawyer. He sued the town of Clarkston, arguing that the town should never have hired Jordan given his troubled past. The town settled the suit for a modest sum, and Chime went back to work. Jordan eventually pleaded no contest to two counts of battery and violating his oath of office and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

  THESE WERE BIG examples of people and institutions embracing change in Clarkston. But every day there were countless smaller examples taking place between citizens intent on negotiating their own peaceful place amid the social and cultural confusion. Perhaps my favorite example of the strange nature and surprising outcomes of these negotiations took place between an Afghan family I came to know and their neighbors, a group of African American drug dealers. The Afghan family lived next door to the men, on the second floor of an apartment building off Memorial Drive outside Clarkston. In the evening, the drug dealers would set up shop on the stairwell, with a view of the parking lot below, where they would sit smoking pot and drinking beer with pistols in their laps, conducting a robust drug trade in the open. The dealers’ friends frequently came over to join the fun and splayed themselves across the staircase that the Afghan family used to get back and forth between their apartment and the parking lot. In the evenings, the Afghan family’s mother would come home and have to negotiate her way through a gauntlet of gun-wielding thugs, through clouds of pot smoke. The men made no effort whatsoever to accommodate her or to show her respect by sliding out of her way. One evening when his mother came in complaining about the men, her teenage son decided he’d had enough. He was small, perhaps five feet, seven inches tall, with narrow shoulders and a thin build, and he spoke little English. But he marched outside and approached the neighbor he knew to be the man in charge. In his culture, the young man explained in halting speech, when a woman walked by on a staircase, men stood and stepped out of the way, as a sign of respect. It was no good, he said, that his mother was not receiving respect from her neighbors outside of her own home. The drug dealer listened impassively through his lecture but didn’t retaliate or argue with his strange-seeming neighbor. Instead, he seemed to take the young man’s case under advisement. And from then on, whenever the young man’s mother walked down the stairs, the men quietly stood, cupped their joints in their hands, and stepped aside.

  IT WAS INTERESTING to consider what the examples of Bill Mehlinger, William Perrin, Tony Scipio, and even these drug dealers said about the possibilities of building community in Clarkston. In the cases of Mehlinger, Perrin, and Scipio, their embrace of their new communities was certainly informed to some degree by morality—a feeling of obligation to live by the Golden Rule. But in all these cases, there was an undeniable element of self-interest as well. Mehlinger’s business was failing until Hong Diep Vo suggested he carry Vietnamese food, and his embrace of refugee employees from various cultures had only strengthened his bottom line. Perrin’s church was about to fail as well; by embracing refugees the church found new vitality, and of course, as evangelicals, members of the old Clarkston Baptist Church were able to successfully proselytize among Muslims and other non-Christians. They were acting, in other words, out of spiritual self-interest. Chief Scipio was looking for a way to bolster his résumé for an intended run for sheriff of DeKalb County. It was certainly in his self-interest to gain a reputation as a man who had cleaned up an outmoded police department, and indeed, some officers driven out by Scipio maintained that they were victims of his ambition—not bad actors. The drug dealer probably made a conscious decision that he didn’t need any trouble from his neighbors, and if stepping aside for their mother was all it took to keep his business running smoothly, he was happy to oblige. There was even an element of self-interest in Luma’s starting the Fugees—of the emotional kind. Thousands of miles from home and estranged from her family, she had embraced a group of strangers, as she herself admitted freely, in part to fill a void in her life.

  And yet, while self-interest—economic, spiritual, emotional—might have been a motivating factor, or even a prime mover, in these examples of cultural connecting in Clarkston, what was most interesting was what happened once the connecting kicked in. Bill Mehlinger found himself with barely a free weekend because he was so busy going to weddings of his current and former employees—events he found he genuinely enjoyed, even if he didn’t understand the particularities behind the rites. William Perrin found himself looking forward to his church’s potluck dinners because he so enjoyed the exotic meals brought by members of the various African congregations. Scipio, even if motivated in part by a desire to bolster his résumé when he sought the job of police chief in Clarkston, came to identify with the refugees during his first week on the job, when it dawned on him that as a black man, without his police uniform he could have easily been singled out by Clarkston cops. And of course, Luma had come to see the Fugees and their parents not as refugees from different cultures so much as family members. Self-interest might have put these disparate souls into close proximity, but proximity bred human connections that, while occasionally complicated and certainly complex, were real and elastic, able to withstand the normal tensions that characterize all human relations without losing their shape.

  IN 2005, A British researcher named Steven Vertovec coined a term to describe the incredible cultural complexity that had taken hold in places like Clarkston, Georgia: super-diversity. In a paper he wrote about super-diversity in the United Kingdom, Vertovec put down his own thoughts about strategies for making super-diversity work, or at least, work better. He noted that top-down efforts to impose contact and understanding between various groups were likely to fail; connecting was something that individuals would have to accomplish organically and on their own. At the same time, he wrote, it was important to remember that a sense of belonging was not a zero-sum game. Immigrants who came to define themselves as British did not do so at the expense of natives who already defined themselves that way
.

  Vertovec proposed a simple three-step process for building connections between members of different cultures within a “super-diverse” society. The first was that rather than ignoring the various categories that distinguish individuals, one should instead consider all the categories an individual belongs to. A Liberian refugee might be a woman, a Christian, a worker, a single mother concerned about neighborhood crime and the safety of her children, and so on. When you become aware of every affiliation a person has, Vertovec argued, broad categories break down and individuality emerges. The listing of every category a person might fit into renders any single category less meaningful. Vertovec and other social anthropologists call this process decategorization.

  The next step, Vertovec proposed, was what he called recategorization, whereby individuals recast themselves not in terms of their differences, but in terms of what they have in common. That Liberian refugee and a white southerner might seem to have little in common if categorized according to race and place of origin, but they might share gender, religion, their identity as single parents, and most powerfully, a concern for the safety of their immediate environment. They might also, for example, both care equally for their jobs at, say, a privately owned small-town grocery store. Vertovec describes this process as redefining the categories of “us” and “them.”

  Next, he suggests what he calls mutual differentiation, an acknowledgment of interdependence that takes into account various group identities. The idea is not that everyone needs to be the same, but that members of various groups respect members of other groups to which they themselves might not belong.

  If it all seems a bit theoretical, Vertovec and other social anthropologists point out that there are already many well-functioning examples of large communities that have successfully gone through this process: practically every cosmopolitan metropolis in the world. People in New York, London, Cairo, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Moscow, and other large cities don’t expect each other to be the same, and yet these cities function with an extraordinary degree of civility, because it’s in the interests—economic, social, and psychological—of the various groups to get along. Super-diversity in New York isn’t viewed as a new, threatening force but rather as the normal state of things. It’s understood that people—perhaps even next-door neighbors—have different backgrounds or beliefs, and yet the universality of this situation essentially puts everyone on even footing. Citizens in such places therefore come to exhibit what Vertovec calls “civility towards diversity.” As diversity becomes the norm, in other words, people cease to focus on it. Diversity becomes “no big deal.” The key to making super-diversity work, in other words, may have less to do with embracing it than ignoring it. Or as the sociologist Lyn Lofland wrote in a book about city life, “Civility probably emerges more from indifference to diversity than from any appreciation of it.”

  Of course, many older residents of Clarkston didn’t want their town to become New York City or Mumbai. What they missed was precisely the simplicity and clarity that had once characterized a place where everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, and went to the same church. Garry W. McGiboney, a longtime Clarkston resident who now worked at the DeKalb County board of education, believed it was the loss of this sense of familiarity—more than xenophobia or racism—that explained opposition to the refugees in Clarkston.

  “If you lived in the same community, on the same street, for all these years, and you know everybody on the street,” McGiboney said, “and one house at a time, they’re either moving away or aging out of their house, and the person who’s moving in is from another country …

  “The small-town community over time was just fading away,” he added. “And that created more of a problem than accepting the diversity.”

  The situation in Clarkston backed up Vertovec’s argument that top-down efforts to promote the embrace of diversity were unlikely to succeed. A group of people mourning the loss of one reality were unlikely to embrace a new one, particularly when that new reality had been imposed on them. And yet, at Thriftown, at the Clarkston International Bible Church, in the police chief’s office, and on the gravel-strewn field behind Indian Creek Elementary where the Fugees played, there were groups of people with a growing comfort toward—if not quite an indifference to—the extraordinary diversity that had come to Clarkston. These pockets of acceptance had arisen organically, out of shared need and from the experience of getting close enough to others to see them not as members of broad social categories but as individuals.

  Chapter Twenty

  The “Soccer People”

  In early September I’d stopped by to talk to Mayor Swaney about the soccer field issue. His office in Clarkston City Hall, down a short hallway with plaque-covered walls, fluorescent lighting, and gray, low-pile industrial carpeting, looked like the Hollywood rendering of the workspace of a small-town mayor. A modest gold rectangular sign reading mayor adorned the door frame. Inside, the official flag of the City of Clarkston—a green banner with gold tassels and cording—drooped nobly in one corner, opposite the Stars and Stripes in another. A gold-painted ceremonial shovel for groundbreakings leaned against a wall. Swaney’s official portrait, a sober three-quarter profile of the mayor in a blazer, hung behind his desk. On an adjacent wall there was a framed print of a bald eagle and an American flag floating majestically in the heavens against an ominous cloudscape.

  Swaney invited me in and asked me to sit down. He was heavyset, but fit-looking, with a barrel chest and bulky midsection that had the effect of making him sigh when he sat down. Swaney’s face had soft, wind-worn features, and with his gray mustache and carefully combed-back thatch of white hair, he projected a grandfatherly air. When I explained I was in town to write about the Fugees and the effects of refugee resettlement on Clarkston, he did his best to dissuade me. Everyone, he said, was getting along just fine.

  “The refugees, the communication between the old residents in the city of Clarkston, is better now than it’s ever been,” Swaney said. “A lot of the longtime residents have learned to get involved with these people, and them people—the different nationalities—get involved with them. And so, it’s really not an issue today.

  “Refugees is like me and you—they’re people,” Swaney continued. “And they come to this country to try to make a better way of life. And I am willing to help them—if they’re willing to help themselves.

  “We’ve tried to get them involved with us,” he added. “But let’s face it—they don’t want to get involved. In their country, I guess, they didn’t have council meetings or get involved with city governments or any kind of governments.”

  Swaney’s words echoed a common belief among many longtime Clarkston residents that few in the refugee community contributed much to the life of Clarkston, and conveyed a common misperception: that the refugees were a monolithic group of strangers from faraway lands. When these new arrivals didn’t band together to get involved in the town, this way of thinking went, it was evidence of a collective failing by the entire refugee community. The refugees, though, didn’t think of themselves as a monolithic group. To a refugee from Burundi, a neighbor from Bosnia or Afghanistan was every bit as culturally and linguistically different as a longtime Clarkston resident like Lee Swaney.

  Swaney’s critics—local progressives and members of the resettlement community for the most part—tended to view him more as a bumbling good ol’ boy than as overtly malicious. As mayor of one of the most socially complex towns in America, they contended, he was simply in way over his head. But this view seemed to underestimate Swaney’s political acumen. The fact was, there was an obvious rationale for any politician in Clarkston to side with locals over refugees. Few of the refugees had been in the U.S. the five years required of citizenship applicants. Though here legally, they couldn’t yet vote, so longtime residents had a disproportionate say on election day.

  In 2005, Swaney had run for reelection against an American-born Muslim candidate named Abdul Akbar. W
hile campaigning, Swaney sent not-so-subtle signals to longtime residents that he understood their fears and concerns over the direction of their community. He pledged, for example, to work hard to recruit a good old-fashioned American restaurant to town. In the end, Swaney won by a vote of 288 to 102 over Akbar. The mayorship of a town of over 7,200 was determined by just 390 voters. And while Akbar’s religion had not become an overt issue during the campaign, it was certainly on the minds of at least some of the voters. On AboutClarkston.com, an online bulletin board where Clarkston residents discuss town goings-on, an anonymous poster celebrated news of Swaney’s victory with a post headlined, “No Muslims in Office, Thank Jesus Christ.”

  When I asked Swaney about the controversy involving soccer in the park and his comments in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—“There will be nothing but baseball down there as long as I am mayor,” Swaney had said. “I don’t have no beef with nobody. But I do have a problem with these big guys playing soccer because those fields weren’t made for soccer.”—he displayed deft skills as a bureaucratic obstructionist that further belied his reputation as a simpleton.

  “We don’t have soccer fields—not in the city,” Swaney told me. “We got baseball. Little League baseball. And they want to play soccer on our baseball fields. And when the land was given to the city it was given for Little League baseball—twelve and under. And this is one of the things they find hard to understand.”

  The mayor’s argument was a red herring. Nathaniel Nyok and the Lost Boys had never played soccer on the town’s baseball field. He and his friends had played on Armistead Field, a big green rectangle of open space, described on the official town website as “a multiuse field.” So why couldn’t they play soccer there? I asked.