Guinea (Was Re: Asian = Oriental, etc.)

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 08:17 AM 2/9/2001 -0500, Dennis Preston wrote:
>>Wrong hemisphere Beverly. "Guinea" in Guinea hen refers to fowl from
>>the West Coast of Africa (the "guinea Coast"). My folk etymology of
>>why southern Italians (perhaps Sicilians in praticular) got to be
>>called "guineas" (hence "Guinea T) stems from the fact that they
>>were known as raisers of these fowl, perhaps particularly in urban
>>aras where the keeping of animals was not common. Anybody got the
>>"real" etymology?
>
>dInIs
>

I think RHHDAS, which I happen to have to hand, does make this fairly clear.
In the 18th cent., imported African slaves, who were mainly brought from
specific areas on the West African coast, were often referred to as "Guinea
Negroes" -- see the bracketed cites at the beginning of the RHHDAS entry for
"guinea." "Guinea" by itself naturally came to mean "of African descent."
After large-scale Italian immigration began late in the 19th cent., this
term came to be applied disparagingly to Italian immigrants (RHHDAS, meaning
2, first cite 1890). Though no explicit theory of the semantic development
is given in RHHDAS, over the last 10-15 years I have seen enough literary
studies articles and monographs on 19C ethnic issues in the U.S. and U.K. to
realize that the 19C evidence indicates that many northern Europeans saw
southern Europeans as dark and therefore similar to Africans.


At 09:11 AM 2/9/2001 -0600, Victoria Neufeldt wrote:
>> Why Guinea? From the (offensive) generalization that downscale urbanites of
>> Italian background are wannabe-macho types who are supposed to be wife
>> beaters. "Guinea tee" is the old-time tee-shirt or undershirt that is
>> frequently pressed into service as casual outerware below a certain income
>> level.
>[snip]
>> Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu
>
>Maybe this answer is meaningful to everyone else, but I still don't get it.
>What has Guinea to do with Italians?
>

Most Italian immigrants to the US were from southern Italy and had slightly
darker skin tones than the English or German immigrants who'd come to North
America earlier. Given their initially weak language skills and largely
rural backgrounds, first-generation Italian immigrants tended to do
downscale work for downscale wages, and were held to have downscale manners
and lifestyles. They were quite aware that this was the "rap" on them, and
that this was all tied up somehow with their often darker skin tone. My wife
recalls her grandmother (who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in
the first two decades of twentieth century) telling a story of her own
mother (born Benevento, in far southern Italy) catching her washing her face
back in the 1910s and saying, "Scrub all you want. It's not coming off."

Given that my own research interests involve Irish studies (my mother's
birth-name is Lawler), I've also seen plenty of research to the effect that
the Irish too, skin tone aside, were associated in some quarters with
Africans, because they were not well off and were considered unmannered,
uncouth, threatening, whatever. Again, my wife's grandmother, who grew up on
the Lower East side, recalled the term "niggers turned inside out" as a not
uncommon anti-Irish comment in the early 20C. So "guinea" and similar terms
applied in those days to people of European background is not necessarily an
issue of skin tone; it was perhaps even more generally an issue of socal
status, generalized opinions about supposedly differing levels of
sophistication among various groups, etc.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu