For those who are oblivious, Mariah Carey’s racial identity has long been a bit of an enigma. The singer whose mother is white and whose father is Black and Afro-Venezuelan has been forced to live with racism as a permeating theme throughout her life and career. After Carey’s emergence as a star on the music scene, various media outlets often misreported and assumed her racial identity. In 1990 Playboy ran an article that described her as “white girl who can sing” and Carey responded saying that her father who is of African-American and Venezuelan descent was very upset. ‘It seems” she told New York Post at the time, “That most people don’t know much about interracial children.” Around the same time, Australia’s Herald Sun described Carey “the new white U.S. soul singer with a reputed eight-octave range.”