The famous aphorism, (and a Justin Timberlake's song) what goes around comes around, appears to have originated in the United States. It refers to a completed cycle, and normally carries a negative connotation.
Merriam-Webster defines it as: “if someone treats other people badly he or she will eventually be treated badly by someone else”
Dictionary.com confirms and adds the ominous foreboding, “Retribution follows wrongdoing; justice may take time, but it will prevail” and suggests the proverb dates from the 1970s.
Oxford Dictionaries simply states, “The consequences of one's actions will have to be dealt with eventually.”
According to this answer on Quora, the earliest instance is from 1962 and the phrase is used repeatedly among the pages of a novel entitled Burn, Killer, Burn! by Paul Crump
“Okay, Joe, this round is yours, only remember, what goes
around, comes around, cop?” He edged out of the booth, pulling the girl with him.“Yeah, I cop. But just so you don't make any mistakes when it comes around, the name is Guy, Guy Morgan, not Joe or Jim.”
However, in a periodical called Science & Society, printed in 1978, the same precept is used, only this time its sense carries a far more positive message.
What this means in human terms is not only that the poor pay more (as Caplowitz tells us), but that the poor share more as well. Stack's monograph contains richly textured descriptions of the way that food, furniture, clothing, appliances, kids and money make the rounds between individuals and households. She subtitles one chapter, "What Goes Round Comes Round," and describes the velocity with which pooling takes place. People try to give what they can and take what they need. […] The pleasures and pressures of such survival networks are predominantly organized around the notion of family.
The anthropologist and author of All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community, (1974) Carol B. Stack, wrote a groundbreaking account of African-American ghettos in the 1970s
The result was a landmark study that debunked the misconception that poor families were unstable and disorganized. On the contrary, her study showed that families in The Flats adapted to their poverty conditions by forming large, resilient, lifelong support networks based on friendship and family that were very powerful, highly structured and surprisingly complex. source
Questions
Did the aphorism, or phrase, originate in the African-American community; is it AAVE (African-American Vernacular English)? Is the 1962 citation, cited in Quora, the earliest known instance? And finally, did “What goes around comes around” originally have a positive interpretation, as suggested by Stack's study, or not?
Best Answer
The earliest instance of the phrase I could find appears in 1952 in The Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper. It uses the phrase in parallel to other positive sentiments, suggesting a positive connotation.
Wikipedia describes the newspaper:
In the text, "they realize that what goes around comes around" is placed alongside phrases like "they see that the scales do balance," "they feel a surge of pride," and "life has its compensations," suggesting a positive connotation.
This shows that the phrase appeared earlier than 1962, and at least offers some anecdotal support for the theory that the phrase originated in African American culture and originally had a positive connotation.