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Mariah Carey's mother, Patricia Carey, once told Oprah Winfrey that her family faced racist abuse because she was married to a Black man.
The interview resurfaced after Patricia's death, which Mariah Carey announced on Monday. She said he sister, Alison, died the same day.
She didn't give their causes of death.
"My heart is broken that I've lost my mother this past weekend," she said in a statement to People.
"Sadly, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day. I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mom before she passed. I appreciate everyone's love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time," she said.
The news drove a resurgence of interest in Carey, one of the most successful pop stars of recent decades, with more than a dozen No. 1 songs and a reported net worth in the hundreds of millions.
Her success is in contrast to her difficult upbringing around New York's Long Island, which Patricia Carey described in an old conversation with Oprah Winfrey.
A clip from the 1999 interview showed Patricia Carey recalling moving to a new, "affluent" part of Long Island, which she hoped would remove them from racist abuse.
But Patricia said it got worse, and someone shot at their home in 1970, when Mariah Carey was a baby.
"I thought 'Well, it's a more affluent area. Maybe we'll be accepted by this group of people.' And of course, that was the worst," she said.
"One of our dogs was poisoned. We had a bow window in the front of the house, and when we were eating one night, or I was clearing the table, someone shot through the window. Luckily, none of the children were in the room. In this affluent neighborhood," she said.
Mariah said that she struggled with people not accepting her heritage.
"I feel like I've come a long way in terms of having people able to accept me, but there are still people to this day, in Europe or wherever I am, they'll say 'Now, you work with all these Black artists and you do this and that.'
I've been saying this for nine years now, explaining but no matter how many times you explain something, people don't understand."
Patricia divorced Mariah's father, Alfred Roy Carey, in 1972 when Mariah was three years old.
Mariah in her 2020 memoir, "The Meaning of Mariah Carey," explained her "complicated" relationship with her mother
"Our relationship is a prickly rope of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment. A complicated love tethers my heart to my mother's," she wrote.
"For my sanity and peace of mind, my therapist encouraged me to literally rename and reframe my family," she added.
"My mother became Pat to me, Morgan my ex-brother, and Alison my ex-sister ... I had to stop expecting them to one day miraculously become the mommy, big brother, and big sister I fantasized about."
In 2001, Patricia was the one who called 911 to get medical help for Mariah, who was then placed under psychiatric care for a limited time, according to Yahoo.
