Mariah Carey has opened up about how she endured racism from a tender age.
In an interview on ET live, Mariah said she had long felt alone as a biracial child. She said she learnt about racism by becoming the victim of it in childhood.
“The only reason I was aware so early on was because it became a subject of humiliation for me as a child,” she said, recalling an early assignment where she was to draw and color a picture of her family.
She said: “I basically got traumatized by the student teachers who thought I had used the wrong crayon because I had drawn my father with a brown crayon.”
Mariah said these kinds of experiences stay with someone at a young age.
She added that she had a close friend who was unaware that Mariah’s father was Black.
According to Mariah, this incident happened when one of her friends came to her house. “The parents didn’t know I was black, they didn’t know that she was going to go into a black man’s house,” she shared. “They’d only met my mother.”
“Mind you, my father is this gorgeous, tall man that looked like a movie star to me, and then to see that happen, it just changes your perspective on things and it twists it,” she said.
Mariah said her story is for “anybody who never felt like they belonged or may or may not have felt that they could succeed because the odds were against them or they were different.”
She describes it as “a survivor’s story, and not everybody realized that about me.
“I was living my dream, but I didn’t feel really connected to anybody,” she said, describing herself as feeling “so ambiguous and like such an outsider.”
Mariah said she started clicking with Derek Jeter after realising that he was also biracial which became “the main thing at that moment” for her, “just knowing there was somebody else out there that was like me.”
