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Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson, said that the spelling of her eldest daughter’s name came from a birth certificate error that wasn’t fixed because of her race.

In the premiere episode of the Spotify podcast, “In My Head With Heather Thomson,” Knowles-Lawson shared the story behind one of the most celebrated names in pop culture.

“A lot of people don’t know that Beyoncé is my last name,” she told the “Real Housewives of New York” alum and fashion designer, in the episode that premiered Tuesday. “It’s my maiden name. My name was Celestine Beyoncé, which at that time was not a cool thing, to have that weird name. I wanted my name to be ‘Linda Smith,’ because those were the cool names.”

The spelling, however, isn’t the same as some of her relatives — who spell it B-E-Y-I-N-C-E. And that’s because an error in her birth certificate was never corrected.

When Knowles-Lawson asked her mother about the different spellings, she simply replied, “That’s what they put on your birth certificate.”

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“So I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you argue and make them correct it?'” the mother of Beyoncé and Solange asked.

“And she said, ‘I did one time, the first time, and I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate,’ because at one time Black people didn’t get birth certificates,” she said.

“They didn’t even have a birth certificate, because it meant that you really didn’t exist. You weren’t important. It was that subliminal message. And so I understood that that must have been horrible for her, not to even be able to have her children’s names spelled correctly.”

And since Beyoncé was such an unusual name,”they were like, ‘How dare you have a French name?’ Like, ‘We’re gonna screw this up real good for you.’ And that’s what they did. So we all have different spellings,” she added.