Readers discuss an article about how darker-skinned southern Italians faced racism a century ago and had to struggle for acceptance.

Re “How Italians Became ‘White,’” by Brent Staples (Sunday Review, Oct. 13): My very white Italian-American children find it hard to believe when I tell them that their four great-grandparents who immigrated to the United States from Sicily in the early 1900s were the brown people of their era. My paternal grandmother, Jennie, would say, “They called us bad names.”