when it comes to africa for example i was taught that they're poor cause their land isn't harvestable or some bullshit like that, and then i find out as an adult it's actually cause western countries fucked the shit out of them and huh that makes a lot more sense
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Italians were being considered non-white as recently as the 80s/90s. I remember seeing a job application from the 80s with the listed employee data as "white, black, asian, italian"
I really wish I'd saved it it'd be grade A meme fuel
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Well if we're being honest Italians do look different on average. In a way that Irish/Polish etc do not. I'd imagine that was the rationale.
if you think an italian looks more differenter than an irish person does compared to someone polish... i dont understand.
like... maybe they all have some vaguely different features in aggregate i guess? but if i saw an italian person living in ireland, i wouldnt whip out my callipers like "hang on that there might be an italian!" ... i wouldnt know unless they told me all about how their family moved there thirty years ago or whatever.
so do they really look that different? im gonna go with no.
There are virtually zero Polish people who look like this
https://afar-production.imgix.net/uploads/images/post_images/images/XAlsxGnutL/original_sicily_occhipinti-16.jpg?auto=compress,format&lossless=true&w=845
Keep in mind that most Italian US migration came from southern Italy. Northern Italians look different too, but it's much subtler and they probably would have been considered white just because a paler appearance is so common there.
If I saw someone like that walking around Sweden, I'd immediately assume they were a tourist or a Middle Eastern migrant.
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Like I said, a disproportionate amount of Italian-americans are from the south.
That's the point, you just named a bunch of places on the southern coast of europe
Such phenotypes are pretty much absent in northern europe, and the few of them that are (think someone like Mr. Bean but even he is white compared to picrelated) are very conspicuous and often even mistaken for foreigners in their own country
this is my point though. in aggregate there might be differences that you can point out, but if you take that as some kind of racial rule, its nonsense. there are obviously always outliers that make your racial definement look silly
The point is, you walk into Brooklyn in the 1920s and 9/20 people look like that
Then you walk into Iowa and 1/20 people look like that
numbers are numbers and we notice them even if we don't mean to. There is an observable difference en masse so it is noticed.
And a greater number of outliers isn't the only thing--if you have more outliers it means you also have more people who are closer to the outliers. If 10% of your pop. lies outside the natural "Anglo" appearance variation, it also means that 60% of your pop. lies on the "darker half" of Anglo appearance variation. It's not "just" the outliers who influence the perception, because everything in nature is analog and continuous, not discrete. Those differences are very noticeable if you just walk into an explicit community of Italians.
The word "Italian" is an aggregate term, so aggregate differences are applied.
italian is a cultural term not a racial term but go off.
im not saying it cant be noticed en masse that people from different areas look a bit different.. what im saying is that on an individual level there isnt anything to differentiate that odd-duck 1/20 iowan from the "racially distinct" 9/20 folks in brooklyn, ergo the distinction isnt distinct and your race science shit is shit.
if you need to do a genetic test to look at phenotype markers to figure out if someone is italian or french or british or irish or polish or whatever with any significant degree of certainty absent them living in a community explocitly of those people... guess what? the only difference is cultural
Italian is a term used to denote people from Italy. If people from Italy look recognizably different in aggregate from the people in country X, then the X people will begin using "Italian" as a "racial" term. Race is a social construct that only exists due to perceivable visual differences from what people are "used" to seeing.
great, so you agree with me. Italian, en masse, look different enough from Anglos to differentiate.
No there isn't. The difference is that when it happens 1/20 times in your ethnicity, and 9/20 times in another, you notice the difference in aggregate. The difference that Italians, on average, look substantially darker and with more Mideast leaning features than Anglos.
And since the term "Italian" is an AGGREGATE TERM, the Italians, IN AGGREGATE, are seen as less white than Anglos.
We are literally in complete agreement here.
Noone said anything about genes. Different extreme ethnicities of Europe look different. South Europeans look different in aggregate from North, and even Eastern look different from Western (the difference is in features, not color, so it's harder for a white American to spot)
Can a single particular individual Italian pass for Russian? Of course. Can a single individual Ukrainian pass as Dravidian South Indian? Of course.
In aggregate though, the differences are very observable (with the Italian-Russian difference being much smaller than the Ukrainian-Dravidian difference, obviously)