This has never happened to me. Mainly because all the Hispanics here are Puerto Rican and Dominican, and although I do have African on my mom’s side, you can’t tell by looking.
On the other hand, my mother is Sicilian and my father is Austrian. Dark complexion, German name, lives in Queens- must be Jewish.
And probably a stereotypical New York accent as well. 
The timing of the posting of this thread made me curious, because my daughter’s best friend is half Sicilian and half Ghanian and had literally just asked us whether we thought Sicilians looked African before I opened ‘new threads’ on my phone and this was at the top (a couple of days ago).
I had the impression, from said daughter’s friend, that this was a stereotype in Italy - that Sicilians look are darker-skinned. She said that her mother was noted by other Italians as not looking Sicilian because she’s very light-skinned and has light brown hair and blue eyes. Akin to asking whether you think that Scots are more likely to have red hair and blue or green eyes, because your mother’s got brown hair, brown eyes, and skin that easily takes a tan and sometimes people (esp foreigners) believe she’s not Scottish.
The kid I went to high school with who had a tattoo of Sicily on his leg could have easily passed as an Arab man in a play or something. Dark hair, dark skin. This kid was tall and skinny but his similarly-colored brother was more “squat.” They both had larger-than-average noses. Not sure if that’s an Arab trait or what.
That all I know of Sicilians. The kid with the Sicily tattoo. And Estel Getty on The Golden Girls, who could not have passed as an Arab man.
Hmm. My wife is half Sicilian. I’ve seen pictures of random people from Siciliy who look very much like members of her family. I assume that’s because a relatively small number of families lived on the island for a long period of time. They all look like people from many areas of the Mediterrean region.
My mother was born in central Italy (Ancona) but her father’s family came from Bari (the “heel” of Italy) and has Greek origins (very common in that part of Italy as well as in Sicily.) Mom had olive skin, brown eyes and dark brown hair.
When mom arrived in the USA in the early 1950’s as the wife of her American soldier husband, she (and I) of course lived with him in the various states he was based in.
Those were the days of Jim Crow and rampant racism among white Americans. So when she was in Virginia, mom was ordered into the “Negroes Only” bathrooms by bossy white people who thought she was dark-skinned enough to be “Mulatto.” When she got to New Jersey, she was put down as a “Puerto Rican Spic.” Once we arrived in Colorado, she was refused service in one place because she was thought to be a “Half-breed squaw.”
(My apologies if the above language offends, but these are things that really happened to my mom, sometimes in my presence; like I say, those were really different times.)
My point is, people can look like one thing and be something else entirely. What we think people to be, often says more about us, than about them.
They look Mediterranean. So do I (Spaniard and very much “your typical Spanish guitar-woman”).
Amen to the above.
because of the heritage of slavery Americans are obsessed with race.
Sicilians usually are stereotyped as short, swarthy, and tending to have a larger than average nose. Grandpa Bodoni was somewhat odd in that he was a redhead with blue or green eyes, and he was fair skinned as redheads often are (redheads lack a particular pigment gene which gives them that red hair and pale skin). He was short, though, and all of his kids had the stereotypical swarthiness (and shortness, for the most part). I don’t remember if he freckled or not.
In short, there is a stereotype, but there are also many people of Sicilian ancestry who break the stereotype in one way or the other, even if the family has been Sicilian for hundreds of years.
I’ve wondered about that too and then I have to remember that other cultures and countries (notably Hispanic ones in South America but also to some degree the French) have had a long history of slavery in their past too, but now mostly do not seem to have quite the same issues with race as we still suffer from in the US.
If I had to put my finger on something in American history and culture as a root source for this racism, I’d have to guess that it began with the racial prejudice and intolerance that came with the religious beliefs of some of the earliest English settlers in America; a quality which lives on today in some Americans, whether they acknowledge it or not.
I’m Sicilian and conscious of how much our features resemble North Africans. In Sicilians like folksinger Michela Musolino or this individual the resemblance to Berber features can be very strong.
Let me put it this way. My mom is of mostly Irish ancestry. Because of her my complexion is considerably lighter than my pure Sicilian dad. Nevertheless, I’ve had this conversation countless times:
Stranger: Where are you from?
Me: Cleveland, Ohio.
Stranger: No, no—I mean where are you really from/where are your parents from?
Me: My parents were both born in Cleveland too.
Stranger: No, you don’t get what I mean… ::flustrated::
(Oh, I get what they mean all right. They’re too shy to come right out and say I look non-American, foreign, but that is exactly what they mean.)
Because I’m tall and a shade lighter complexioned than Mediterranean olive, I’ve often been taken for an Afghan. Other times people have convinced themselves I must be an Arab. I’ve had Arab guys hit on me by saying “'Scuse me, miss, but are you Arab?..” It was fun to tell them to leave me alone in Arabic. I’ve had a white American guy get all up in my grill and tell me “You people should go back to the Middle East. You people are ruining everything.”
Huh, my ancestors have been in America for a good 300 years, probably longer than any of his, and I’m directly descended from Revolutionary War veterans to boot (I have not seriously thought of joining the DAR, no thank you. My very Democratic grandmother and mother also made fun of the idea in their day). But nobody ever believes I’m American. My, but what a weird world this is.
Not so sure. I mean, there aren’t that many “pure-bred” places in Europe at all, but Sicily seems to be very much of a melting pot, with lots and lots of coming and goings in its history. Sure there are isolated mountain villages, but I just can’t say I saw much of a homogeneous look in Sicily as a whole.
This thread for example, has reminded me of all the Norman churches you can find all over Sicily. The Normans hung out there a fair bit, so perhaps some of the blondes and redheads have that in their ancestry.
It wasn’t much of a post. I guess the thought that occurred to me when seeing the thread was that the commonality I’ve seen among Sicilians (which has only been Americans of Sicilian descent, and photographs) was the family resemblance, not so much of a tie to a broader ethnicity. Any Sicilians I’ve met or seen pictures of without that resemblance didn’t really register a persistent impression. Also, the family resemblance thing probably is centered around Palermo, people in the photographs probably were closely related to my wife and her family. So I just can’t say much about a general resemblance between Sicilians and other groups of people.
The only Sicilian Italian I know looks a lot like all the Greeks I know, and unlike the other (Northern) Italians I know, or any of the North Africans I know, so I voted “Greek” - seems like a popular choice.
I can’t tell for sources, but I can tell you one detail which seems to be very representative of the whole difference: the “one drop rule”, and the accompanying notion that anybody with a multiracial background “belongs” to whichever race is viewed as “darker”. At least nowadays the idea that someone can actually be multiracial is finally taking hold, thanks to some high-profile ones refusing to accept other people’s labels. Latin America had a period where some people had lots of fun trying to come up with specific names for each possible racial mix, but most of them got dropped pretty fast and in general remaining ones are viewed as a matter of being precise, not as one of deciding who is socially higher than whom based on where their foreparents were from.
This same situation happens to me at my job.
I’ve never met a person who claimed to be Sicilian, so I don’t have an image of them as a group. And the only pop culture reference I can recall about Sicilians is a reference from Princess Bride (“Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!”). And of course Pizza Hut has commercials about Sicilian pizza, but that’s not particularly helpful, demographically speaking.
I guess I’ll pick the last one (Puerto Rican, Mexican, etc)
For a long time I thought Mario Lopez was Italian (I didn’t quite grasp (and still probably don’t) the whole Italian/Sicilian thing) rather than Hispanic because he looked similar in skin tone and hair to one of my childhood friends and his family. They were only a gen or so removed from living in Sicily and still had many relatives living there, and even went there for vacations occasionally.
Yeah, Mario LOPEZ’s last name should have been a clue I was way off. But his first name MARIO, well, Mario is an ITALIAN plumber, right?
:smack::smack::smack::smack: