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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