Sunny Hostin received some shocking information during her recent appearance on Finding Your Roots. On this morning’s episode of The View, the co-host revealed she was “deeply disappointed” to learn that she is a descendant of slaveholders.
What Hostin found out on the Henry Louis Gates Jr.-hosted PBS series — which traces the lineage of celebrities — was that her mother’s family, while Puerto Rican, actually originated from Spain. While she originally thought she came from a family of printers and journalists, she explained to the Hot Topics panel that her family had moved to Puerto Rico with their slaves after the slave trade was “canceled” in Spain.
“At first I was deeply disappointed,” Hostin said, before Joy Behar chimed in, “The slave thing is a bummer.”
Despite the shocking information, Hostin fired back at viewers who don’t believe she deserves reparations.
“I still believe in reparations, by the way, so y’all can stop texting me and emailing me and saying that I’m a white girl and that I don’t deserve reparations,” she demanded. “It’s too much, people.”
Whoopi Goldberg then joked, “I don’t know who sent her a thing telling her she’s a white girl. But clean off your television screens.”
Before they ended the segment, Hostin reiterated her stance on reparations.
“I still believe this country has a lot to do in terms of racial justice,” she said. “But what I will say is that I feel that I’m enriched by knowing that history. I’m enriched. And I’m enriched by knowing that my family has come so far from being enslavers to my mother marrying my father in 1968.”
Hostin, whose birth name is Asunción Cummings, also opened up about her decision to change her Spanish moniker during her appearance on Finding Your Roots. According to the legal expert, she changed her professional name after Court TV host Nancy Grace struggled to pronounce Asunción.
“She was like, ‘Do you have another name? A nickname? I don’t know.’ And she just kept at it,” Hostin recalled. “She was basically telling me, ‘You’re very good at this, but that name is not gonna fly. You need to just go by a nickname.’”
She continued, “I said, ‘Well, some friends in school who couldn’t pronounce my name call me Sunny. But, no one in my family calls me Sunny, I don’t use it professionally.’ And the next segment, I was Sunny Hostin.”
The View airs on weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.