The peoples who are making, or have made in recent years, the most progress in America today are, I suspect, the Jews, the Negroes, and the Japanese. There is, of course, no comparison to be made between the Jew, the Japanese, and the Negro as to their racial competence. Of all the immigrant peoples in the United States, the Jews are the most able and the most progressive; the Negro, on the other hand, is just emerging, and is still a little afraid of the consequences of his newly acquired race-consciousness.

What is alike in the case of the Jew, the Negro, and the Japanese is that their conflict with America has been grave enough to create in each a new sense of racial identity, and to give the sort of solidarity that grows out of a common cause. It is the existence in a people of the sense of a cause which finally determines their group efficiency.

In some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. We are seeking to do, through the medium of our local community organizations, such things as will get attention and interest for the little world of the locality. We are encouraging a new parochialism, seeking to initiate a movement that will run counter to the current romanticism with its eye always on the horizon, one which will recognize limits and work within them.

Our problem is to encourage men to seek God in their own village and to see the social problem in their own neighborhood. These immigrant communities deserve further study.

Robert E. Park

CHAPTER VII
MAGIC, MENTALITY, AND CITY LIFE

I. MAGIC AND PRIMITIVE MENTALITY

Few words of African origin have survived and found a permanent place in the popular speech of the English West Indies. One of these is “obeah.” Of this word, J. Graham Cruickshank, in a little pamphlet entitled Black Talk says:

Obeah—which is Negro witchcraft, and whose worst aspect was the poisonous idea put into the mind of the subject—has gone under to a great extent. Extraordinary cases of it crop up now and again in the newspapers. It is the most difficult of all anthropological data on which to “draw” the old Negro. Burton gives an Old Calabar proverb: “Ubio nkpo ono onya” (They plant Obeah for him) and adds this note: “‘Ubio’ means any medicine or charm put in the ground to cause sickness or death. It is manifestly the origin of the West Indian ‘obeah.’ We shall be the less surprised to hear that the word has traveled so far when told by Clarkson, in his History of the Slave Trade, that when the traffic was a legitimate branch of commerce as many slaves were annually exported from Bonny and the Old Calabar River as from all the rest of the West African Coast.”[[63]]

Obeah is Negro magic. The paper which follows was suggested by observation on Negro magic during a recent visit to the English Islands in the Caribbean.