Starring in the new film The Butler is bringing up some difficult childhood memories for Mariah Carey. During a press conference for the movie (oening in theaters Aug. 16), the "#Beautiful" singer revealed that a white person spat on her because of the color of her skin, reports Yahoo! Movies. 

"That actually happened to me," Carey said, referencing a scene in The Butler that was meant to be a recreation of the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in in North Carolina in the '60s. In the movie, America's Next Top Model alumna Yaya Alfia plays a Black college student who asks to be served at the whites-only counter and gets spat on by a white woman.

"I know people would be in shock and not really want to believe or accept that, but it did," continued Carey. "... That right there, that was almost the deepest thing to me in the movie because I know what she went through."

Oprah Winfrey, who also stars in the movie and attended the press conference interjected, "Where? Somebody spit on you?"

Carey answered, "Yeah. In the face, and in the same way."

Previously, in an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show last year, Carey recalled another racist incident, when she was laughed at by teachers for drawing a depiction of her bi-racial family — her mother is of Irish descent, her father is of Black/Venezuelan descent.

"One of the first memories I have is when I was in kindergarten or nursery school, they asked us to draw a picture of our family and so I was drawing everybody and I got to my father and I started to make him brown. And, they were like — the kindergarten teachers are often young — and the two women were standing behind me giggling. And I turned around, self-conscious, and asked, 'Why are your laughing?' And they said, 'You’re doing that wrong. Why are you making your father the wrong color?' And I said, 'No, that’s the color that he is.' They made me feel like something was wrong with me, that it was a bizarre freakish thing."

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 (Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images For BET)