Mariah Carey claims she was spat on in a racist attack by a classmate when she was a child because she is biracial.

The '#Beautiful' singer, whose mother, Patricia, is Irish and late father, Alfred, was of African-American and Venezuelan decent, experienced abuse for her biracial background when she was growing up in Long Island, New York, but believes it helped her prepare for her role in the new movie 'The Butler'. Speaking about a scene in the movie where a white woman spits on a black college student, she told Yahoo! Movies during a press conference for the film: ''That actually happened to me.''

She 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.'' Mariah, who has two-year-old twins, Moroccan and Monroe, with her husband Nick Cannon previously revealed during an interview with her co-star Oprah Winfrey that she was once told by a school teacher that she had given her father the ''wrong colour'' in a picture she drew of her family.

She said: ''I said, 'No that's the colour that he is.' They made me feel like something was wrong with me, that it was a bizarre freakish thing.''