Mixed Race Studies

Mariah Carey Recalls How Important It Was To Be Seen As A Black Woman On The 2005 Cover Of ESSENCE

Essence
2021-01-14

Kemberlie Spivey

Mariah Carey recently sat down with Questlove (real name Ahmir Khalib Thompson) for a new episode of his podcast Questlove Supreme during which she detailed some of her struggles growing up as a child who was racially ambiguous. Challenges, she notes, that continued to follow her throughout the ’90s, 2000s, and even to this day.

“When people years from now tell my story — hopefully that happens — they’re gonna have to use that book as a template,” Carey said of her memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey which was released this past September. “This is my actual story. I look at a lot of people that I admired who didn’t get a chance to do that. They may have told their stories through their music and people interpret their stories.”

Explaining the approach to her memoir which was written in collaboration with former ESSENCE editor Michaela Angela Davis, Carey continues, “I know some people, Ahmir, like to have everybody else’s input and their perspective. But what I wanted was to tell my actual story, which doesn’t begin with, ‘Mariah Carey put out Vision of Love in 1990.’ No, it doesn’t begin with that. It begins [with me] coloring in the ‘wrong’ crayon with a brown crayon for my father, so they all freak out at me. It begins with, ‘I don’t understand my hair because I’m [half-black]. It begins with all these identity issues, these issues of race, these struggles. Then it goes to the issues of control.”

When the five-time Grammy-award winner released her first album, Mariah Carey, at just 21 it became the best-selling album in the United States, selling more than 15 million copies. But that success didn’t shield Carey from some of the same identity issues she dealt with throughout her entire childhood…

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Episode Six: A More Perfect Union

The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)
Public Broadcasting Service
Tuesdays, 2013-10-22 through 2013-11-26, 20:00-21:00 ET

From Black Power to Black President

By 1968, the Civil Rights movement had achieved stunning victories, in the courts and in the Congress. But would African Americans finally be allowed to achieve genuine racial equality? Episode Six, A More Perfect Union (1968-2013), looks at the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the rise of the Black Panthers and Black Power movement.  The decline of cities that African Americans had settled in since the Great Migration, the growth of a black middle class, the vicious beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the ascent of Barack Obama from Illinois senator to the presidency of the United States are all addressed in the final episode of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. Revisit images of the Black is Beautiful movement and hear commentary from former Black Panther Party member Kathleen Cleaver, former Secretary of State Colin H. Powell, musician Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, and many more…

For more information, click here.