I moved around a lot as a little kid but spent my post-12 years in the Philly suburbs. In that place and time, Italians were a race. The kids who were Italian had dark skin. They had black hair and were tan! There weren't many African-American kids in my school district (a few), but there were Italian-Americans. Hello my first kiss, where are you now. They were actually the cool kids so being "racialized" didn't hurt them (this is complicated but true enough), but they were racialized. I thought Italians all had dark skin.
I'm not sure what my point is other than "race is a social construction, and it's complicated." That's good enough for a blog post.
