In an appearance on Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live on Thursday night, Mariah Carey shed some light on a racist encounter she and Nick Cannon’s 9-year-old son, Moroccan, recently faced.
"Rocky just got bullied the other day by a white supremacist person that he thought was his friend," Carey said. "It's like, insane. So, this is the world we live in."
The incident came up when Cohen and Carey were discussing the impact prejudice had on her own upbringing. Carey went on to say that she reads Moroccan and his twin sister, Monroe, segments from her recently-released autobiography, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, in order to help them better understand the world and situations like the one Moroccan faced.
"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.
Mariah Carey and her son Morrocan in concert, 2017 - Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images
In the interview, Carey also speaks on what it was like to grow up biracial in a predominantly white area. She tells of an experience in school in which she was assigned to draw a picture of her family and was "traumatized" by her teacher assistants, who reprimanded her for using a brown crayon for her father, not knowing he was black. She also talks about an incident in which a childhood friend came to her house and became terrified upon finding out that Carey's father was black, having only met Carey's white mother prior to that day. The racial experiences Carey details in her book ring very relevant, considering today's cultural weather.
"It's 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 was because it became a subject of humiliation for me as a child," said Carey.
The 50-year-old singer’s autobiography was released on September 29th, and in it Carey unravels the highs and lows of her career and personal life, including her affair with MLB legend Derek Jeter during her first marriage.
Watch the clip from her appearance on the show below.