Mariah Carey has a "whole struggle" with her identity.
Mariah Carey
The 'We Belong Together' hitmaker - whose mother was Irish and father was Black - admitted it was never "easy" for her being mixed race as she felt so different from everyone else.
She said: "Me, a teenage girl, when I got signed and very much, 'Look, I'm appreciative of all the focus and the this and the that that I received as an artist', but let's face it, it's never been easy for me. This journey, this whole struggle with my identity started when I was like three or four years old and that's when I first started to recognise, 'Oh, I'm not like everybody else.'
"I don't necessarily have a specific quote 'tribe' to back me up during situations because, you know, I was never enough of one thing or another for most people. Specifically when I released my first album, I'm like, 'Well what did they expect me to do,' like unless I had a sticker that said 'I'm black' on my forehead on the album cover people did not know how to perceive."
And Mariah finds it "interesting" that a lot of people don't even know she is Black.
Speaking to DJ Trevor Nelson on his BBC Radio 2 show Rhythm Nation, she added: "But it's interesting, I was talking to Oprah the other day and she was like, 'A lot of people didn't even know you were Black,' and I'm like, 'How many times can I say it, how many times could I discuss it?' like particularly in America. And we'd got into this as well, the one drop rule is a real thing that happened with slavery and from the time of slavery. That was the way that people were kept, black people were kept captive by having this rule of if you even have one drop of black blood, and this is a very American thing, then you are considered black, so when me saying my father's black, my mother's Irish, to me that's just explaining because they are confused by the ambiguity of how I look and have always looked. So to me that was already saying I'm black because I said my father's black, that makes you black, but to be black and mixed and ambiguous looking is a very interesting road, particularly when you're in the industry."
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