American in Italy here! I am not justifying this, just explaining it from an Italian perspective. First, the paper is not mixing up her Indian heritage here with Native American. They took the idea that she is seeking a white male VP running mate and wrote "hunting for a white man", which conjured up a funny (to them) homage to native Americans in spaghetti westerns. Second, this paper is a sensationalist rag sold in grocery store checkout lanes, with no expectation for the stories to be good, or free of any number of unsavory isms.
They should be using median net worth, not average. Median will indicate the actual middle of wealth distribution in the US, while average is skewed high by the wealth of millionaires and billionaires.
According to the Census Bureau's 2022 The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)
Percentile 2021 dollars 10th . . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 25th . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16,560 50th . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166,900 75th . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604,900 90th . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1,623,000
So he's firmly upper middle class. Like most normal boomers.
Italy:
Paid maternity leave: 5 months (plus two hours per day for breast feeding for the rest of the first year).
Paid paternity leave: 10 days
The parents also get an additional 6 months of "parental leave" between them where they can take off and get paid 30% of their normal salary.
Paid sick leave: Capped at 180 days per year