Did you know? Mariah Carey faced racism while growing up

Carey says her character in The Butler is very close to what she went through when growing up.

Singer Mariah Carey, who will be seen in Lee Daniel’s upcoming historical drama The Butler, shared that her character in the film is very close to what she went through when growing up.

The pop icon told Yahoo! Movies about the hard times she faced as mixed-race kid in Long Island, New York. The 43-year-old singer, who was born to an Irish mother and a Venezuelan and African-American father, told the press that a white person spat on her when she was a child.

“That actually happened to me,” said Carey, reported eonline.com. “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 a bus as well. It was [on] a school bus, in the face, and in the same way.”



In a previous interview with Oprah Winfrey, Carey shared another incident where she was asked to draw herself and was made fun of by her kindergarten teachers for drawing a picture of her father’s skin in ‘the wrong color’.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 12^th, 2013.

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