Mariah Carey is opening up about her experiences with racism as a child, and how bigotry has impacted her own children. The singer joined Andy Cohen remotely on Thursday’s Watch What Happens Live, and shared an experience that her 9-year-old son, Moroccan, recently faced.
During the WWHL after show, Carey dished on her newly released memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. The GRAMMY winner said she’s been reading the book to her kids to share stories from her life and help them understand the world.
“I’m reading chapters to them that are helping to illustrate my encounters with racism, and how they can then have a greater understanding, and ultimately a greater reservoir with which to deal with the situation itself,” Carey shared.
Racism and racial prejudice are things her son has already had to deal with in a painful way, as Carey explained.
“Rocky just got bullied the other day by a white supremacist person that he thought was his friend,” Carey shared. “It’s like, insane. So, this is the world we live in.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/I_MVgn5QKQc?feature=oembed
Carey’s memoir details several traumatic and formative experiences from her own past, and she said that racism and prejudice has “been a struggle for me since I was aware that there was such a thing as race.”
“And the only reason I was aware so early on is that it became a subject of humiliation for me, as a child,” Carey continued, recalling several times that her race has played a factor in how she was treated growing up.
One incident involved a traumatic run-in when she was young with a group of girls she thought were friends, but who bullied her in a deeply painful way, which she details in the book.
Carey recalled how she let her 9-year-old daughter, Monroe, hear that chapter of the book, and was stunned by her reaction.
“I let her hear that. And it was really sweet, she goes, ‘Mommy, those girls, they feel so bad now. I bet they wish they could be your friend,'” she recalled.
