Guinea T

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 12:12 PM 2/9/01 -0500, you wrote:
>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

The term "guinea" was also applied to mixed-race people in Appalachia
(variously called tri-racials, White-Indian-Negro or WINs, or Melungeons
when one wanted a fancier or more acceptable term).  The African ancestry
was obviously alluded to in the use of "guinea," though Moroccan, Arab,
Greek, and other "swarthy" ancestry (including Italian) was also claimed,
esp. by those who didn't want to acknowledge actual African American
roots.  It was the connection with a T-shirt that eluded me!  (I'm of the
old Marlon Brando school, so if it had been called a Brando T, I'd have
understood.)

_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm