There’s a theory going around that the reason Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary is because many black voters saw the spelling of his name and assumed that he too was black. One Democratic lawmaker said that back when the slaves were freed many of them didn’t know how to spell Green, and that’s why they have an “e” at the end.
I’ve lived in the south for a few years and have never heard this. In fact the other day I was talking to a guy who was as white as could be and his last name was Greene with an “e.” Also there’s the famous Revolutionary War hero Nathaniel Greene.
And to me it would make more sense that people with limited spelling skills would just spell Green the way it is traditionally written instead of Greene which could be construed as sounding like “Greeney.”
So what’s the straight dope on this.
:eek: Holy crap, that’s one dumb and/or credulous lawmaker. “Greene” (or “Grene”) has apparently been a common alternative spelling of “Green” ever since the name originated.
The one marginally rational aspect of this “theory” about Alvin Greene’s victory, AFAICT, is the claim that black voters might think the surname “Greene” sounds more likely to be African-American than “Green”. I’d hypothesize that this might be true because Americans in general (not only blacks) probably tend to assume that someone named “Greene” is more likely to be non-Jewish than someone named “Green”.
This in turn is because 20th-century Jewish immigrants appear to have anglicized names containing German “Gruen” to “Green” more often than “Greene”:
So a “Greene” would seem more likely to be either a white person of early Anglo-American descent, or a black person whose ex-slave ancestors adopted the name of a white family of that description. A “Green”, on the other hand, would seem more likely to be a Jew of recent European ancestry.
(Not that there aren’t plenty of counterexamples to both those perceived trends in nomenclature; I’m just suggesting a possible reason why the perception of such a trend might not be entirely off-base. The “freed slaves couldn’t spell green” speculation, on the other hand, seems to me completely off-base, if not actually extra-planetary. Sheesh.)
I know anecdotes are worth zilch, but an extremely cute (white) girl I went to HS with was named Greene, the only Greene I guess I ever knew except her not-quite-as-cute older sister.
But Brian Greene? Graham Greene (both of them!), where did this guy get his info? I don’t recall a single African American Greene.
I was going to say Al Green but he was born with the spelling Greene.
“Alvin Greene” sounds blacker than “Victor Rawl,” anyway.
Greene is a reasonably common surname in the South for whites and blacks, but “Alvin” is more likely to be a black person’s name. So I don’t have much problem believing that Greene got a lot of votes because black voters were voting for what they presumed to be a black man.
Lou Rawls makes me think “black”.
And the only Alvins I ever knew were all white, 2 different clans that liked the name so much that there was a Alvin Sr. and Alvin Jr. in both clans.
I know, an anecdote.
Well this woman, who is white BTW, apparently mistook him for the singer.
What about Mean Joe Greene? (Who kicks ass, btw)
According to fivethirtyeight (see here and here), there’s nearly no relationship between the percentage of registered non-white voters and how well Greene did.
As somebody pointed out in the big thread on this, Columbia has a Greene Street two blocks from the goddamned State House, and it is not named for a black man.
A Bing image search for “Alvin -chipmunks -York” turns up more black faces than a random distribution of “Alvin” across the races would suggest. In other words, there are black Alvins, white Alvins, and Asian Alvins, but it appears that a greater percentage of blacks get named Alvin.
Every person I’ve known that was named Greene was Jewish. So for me, I’d think that.
The only Greenes I know are black. One of them, as it happens, is a local county elected officeholder.