Mariah Carey Recalls Personal Experiences With Racism

Mariah Carey’s own experiences with racism assisted the actress in to getting in to character for her newest film. In “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” Carey plays a woman whose rapist kills her  husband right in front of her son’s eyes.

Despite living in a “safe” suburban neighborhood in Long Island, Carey’s  mixed raced parents (her mother is Irish American and her father is African  American and Venezuelan) meant the singer grew up being acutely aware of race  issues.

At the film’s press conference on Monday in New York City, Carey recalled how  she was spit on by a fellow student on the school bus because of the color of  her skin.

“That actually happened to me,” Carey said. “I know people would be in shock and not really want to believe or accept that,  but it did.”

“That right there, that was almost the deepest thing to me in the movie  because I know what she went through — and it happened to be on a bus, it was a  school bus.”

While Carey is known for her glamorous image, such frankness about her  difficulties growing up as a biracial child is nothing new.

Last year she appeared on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and shared another  heartbreaking childhood moment.

“One of the first memories I have is when I was in kindergarten or nursery  school and they asked us to draw a picture of our family; and so I was drawing  everybody and I got to my father and I started to make him brown. And, they were  like, the kindergarten teachers are often young, and the two women were standing  behind me giggling. And I turned around, self-conscious, and asked, ‘why are  your laughing?’ And they said, ‘you’re doing that wrong. Why are you making your  father the wrong color?’ And I said, ‘No, that’s the color that he is.’ They  made me feel like something was wrong with me, that it was a bizarre freakish  thing.”