> I think maybe the confusion is that I’m an American of South Asian descent. My parents immigrated to the United States a few decades ago from South Asia. To me all these people just look like white people and I can’t really tell how they would look ethnic or different aside from maybe hair color.
Yeah, I can understand the confusion from your perspective. You don't have the context. The US has a broad history of discrimination.
In 2026, there's a lot less. In the 1960s it was still common for country clubs (fancy golf courses and social clubs, more or less) to prohibit Jewish people from joining; this was an issue at some clubs even into the 1990s.
(Since you brought up Italians), Italians were also discriminated against in the US, but more in the 1800s and early 1900s; by the 1960s, Italians were largely integrated, although as many were/are Catholic, they would be excluded from 'WASP' - White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Around the same time that Italians faced a lot of discrimination, Irish did too, as they were also largely Catholic.
If you're familiar with redlining as a discrimination practice, to give you an idea of popular discrimination targets, Wikipedia says:
> Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans
But that's not an exclusive list of discrimantion targets, just those that were large enough to target when home lending started getting more organized.
You also had racial covenants prohibiting selling land to non-whites, where that would exclude African Americans, most Asians, often Jewish people, maybe Hispanics and Italians and Irish. Those were made void in 1968, but it takes time and effort to remove them from deeds, so you might run into them.