Originally Posted by
Restingvoice
I think he replied "was she? I thought she's Italian" as in assuming she's white/light when someone asked isn't she supposed to be dark/tan/black.
People call it colorism. The tendency to default to light skin when the ethnicity is not clearly POC. As in when it's not black, indigenous, middle eastern, Indian, etc., the assumption is immediately they're light skin.
Then when they're established to be dark skin, someone lighten their skin up.
Examples of colorism is other countries are in South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Arab, Japan, or India where their beauty standard is picking light skin celebrity/model as the preferred/default, even though they have dark skin people. Even the ones that have majority of dark skin people in their country, their entertainment industry prefer light skin, coz they follow Hollywood or European fashion show.