Left behind was a spreading stain which seeped so deeply inside of me that to this day I’ve never been completely to scrub it out.” It’s both a beautiful and heartbreaking sentiment, especially when she follows it up by saying this experience took place in preschool when she was creating a family portrait. The one book she remembered him having in his house that was appropriate for her age was about about a little blind, Black boy that she believes was her father’s attempt to “introduce the concepts of racism and perception” because they didn’t actually talk about “the shades and the shapes of us.” Painting a Picture of RacismĬarey describes her first experiences with racism as “like a first kiss in reverse: each time a piece of purity was ripped from my being. Time spent with her father, Alfred Roy Carey, is remembered in this memoir as decadent Italian dinners, patient lessons on how words have meaning (asking her if she wanted to “borrow” money for the ice cream truck or simply “have” it is probably a good lesson for all of us), driving in the Porsche with which he was forever tinkering, and reading next to him while he watched football. In that latter moment, a 4-year-old Carey called for help (though not the police, as she only knew one phone number) eventually they did arrive, surveyed the scene, and said, “If this kid survives it will be a miracle.” To have such a statement burning in one’s heart and mind all of these years can be both a drive to be that miracle and a constant reminder of just how rare your chances are. Here she explains what that really meant for her psyche as a young child, including feeling like her siblings resented her for being a “golden child” as the youngest and the lightest, as well as thinking they thought she was passing as a white child since she lived with their mother in a mostly white neighborhood.Įven more emotional, though, are her descriptions of the volatility within her home that required the police to be called on more than one occasion: watching her father and brother come to blows and watching her father shove their mother into the wall so hard she fell unconscious. Here, Variety selects some of the highlights of “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” which is also read by the author herself on the Audible audiobook, plus a few burning questions that still remain: Opening Her HomeĬarey has often spoken about being born to a white mother and Black father and not seeing anyone that looked like her as a child - not even her older siblings, who were both darker-skinned than she was growing up.
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