Mariah Carey: I Was Spat On in Racist Attack During Childhood

Singer is bi-racial and grew up in Long Island

Mariah Carey's character in Lee Daniels' The Butler hits close to home for the singer.

The pop icon opened up to Yahoo! Movies about the hard times she faced growing up as a biracial kid in Long Island, N.Y.

The 43-year-old, whose father is of Venezuelan and African-American decent while her mother is Irish, described a particular incident from her past where she was a victim of an outright racially charged attack.

The singer turned actress told the crowd during the press conference for the film that she was spat on by a white person when she was a child.

"That actually happened to me," she explained, referring to a scene in the movie meant to recreate the Woolworth's Lunch Counter sit-in—where a black college student gets spat on by a white woman.

The "#Beautiful" singer added, "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 a school bus, in the face and in the same way."

Carey has been open in the past about her struggles to fit into school when she was younger and the prejudices she faced for being biracial.

In fact, during an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Carey even recalled a time when in school she was asked to draw herself and was made fun of by her kindergarten teachers for drawing a picture of her father's skin "the wrong color."

"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," she said at the time.