I remember hearing a group of white women referring to them as “Ghetto Whites”. Italians are still discriminated against. My Greek professor is way darker than her, and he also has a white, WASPY mother. My friend has tanned skin, dark hair, blue eyes, and freckles to boot. We were just as surprised to find that he was just a teenage Sicilian immigrant. That shocked me, and when I found that my friend’s ancestor was listed as black on that census form, I thought the ancestor was just a biracial who had a Sicilian father, and so did she. I knew they weren’t considered white back then, but I had no idea they actually wrote them down as black on census forms. I thought it was interesting looking at back then and looking at them now. We spoke to my friend’s Sicilian grandfather, and he said that one of his brothers was dating a white girl from the South back in the day and that her family considered him “black.” They thought that was weird because by that time, they were living in New York. Exactly like my friend who has a Sicilian father (and he is very dark-skinned) and white Southerner for a mother. So most Italian-Americans also have a white parent of some other descent, especially if they were born after 1980. The great majority of Italians are now middle class to upper middle class and wealthy. Italian is the fourth largest ethnic group reported among white Americans. However, this mass immigration leads into Italian-Americans today: The mass immigration for Italians didn’t start until 1880 and even then, they were discriminated against. It was highly unlikely (damn near impossible) for a Southern Italian to own a slave because they were seen as the same as blacks, and at the time, they were the second (right behind blacks) most discriminated against group. The reason I say very few is because over 80% of Italian immigrants were from Southern Italy (Sicily, Abruzzo, Calabria, Campania, Sardinia, Naples, etc.)
This wasn’t true, and there are actually dark-skinned Italians all over Italy, not just in the South, as well as light-skinned Italians all over Italy. The very few Northern Italians that immigrated here perpetuated the myth that Southern Italians and Greeks were of a different race than them in order to save their own asses. One of the biggest mass lynchings happened to Italians in New Orleans when they thought that a Italian immigrant had killed a “white” police officer. They were designated as “black” on census forms if they lived in the South and that is because the majority of them were dark-skinned Sicilians. They weren’t allowed to marry “whites.” It was difficult, damn near impossible. Southern Italians were considered “black” in the South and were subjected to the Jim Crow laws of segregation.
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