Historians have documented the process of how Italian Americans “became white” in the U.S. during a wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Guglielmo & Salerno, 2012; Roediger, 2018). Roediger (2018) suggests that Italian immigrants, as well as immigrants from other parts of Eastern and Southern Europe, had a racial status of “in between,” meaning that their status as white was in flux, changing when it was political advantageous for them and "full whites." However, by the mid-20th century, their status shifted to full whiteness. This body of literature falls under the moniker of “whiteness studies,” which explore the politics and creation of white identity. While historians have documented this process, and musicologists have explored musical performance in the Italian diaspora (Sorce Keller, 2016), no research exists on how music and music education (in formal and informal settings) played a part in this process. This paper presentation examines the process of “becoming white” through music performance and informal music education by conducting archival research (Feldman-Barrett, 2015; Levy & Emmery, 2021). The archive includes a recording on 78 of my ancestors performing Sicilian and Italian folksongs as well as U.S. popular songs including a variation on the minstrelsy song “Mammy’s Little Coal Black Rose,” as well as recorded interviews with family members about music making and race. The archives document the ways informal music making within an Italian American family is an education in whiteness. The album begins with Sicilian folk songs; these transition to American popular music, culminating with a Minstrelsy song with overtly racial and racist meanings. This documentation of music tracks the process of first- and second- generation Italian Americans “becoming white” (Guglielmo & Salerno, 2012; Roediger, 2018). The findings of this inquiry provide nuance to the sizable body of research on race and music education that is particularly popular in North America (e.g. Bradley, 2007; Hess, 2018) by bring a “whiteness studies” framework to the literature dominated by anti-racist frameworks. This study adds to this literature by exploring how music education plays a part not just in representing racial identities and power dynamics, but also how racial identity is "performatively constituted" (Butler, 1999) through music performance and education. Similarly, findings explore how racial identities are in flux, not as attributes of fixed identities. Finally, the findings bring an explicit discussion of race to the research in informal music education.