Sunny Hostin had a difficult conversation with her mother after participating in Finding Your Roots.
During Thursday's episode of The View, the 55-year-old co-host shared how her mom, Rosa Beza, reacted to Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. informing Hostin that her maternal ancestors had "likely" owned slaves.
Discovering that her third great-grandfather was "the son of a merchant who was likely involved in the slave trade" and had owned at least one person was just one of the many revelations."surprising revelations about my family history," Hostin said on The View. While discussing with the panelists that her ancestors from Galicia, Spain, had moved to Puerto Rico as "enslavers," Hostin also disclosed that she discovered on the PBS genealogy seriesthat she is only 7 percent of indigenous Puerto Rican descent.
"It was very disappointing because my mother strongly identified as Puerto Rican. She was involved in the civil rights movement and deeply immersed in Black culture. She identified herself as Black racially but Hispanic ethnically, even though her race is white — she's European," Hostin explained.
"I know, it's strange, because when you look at her, my mother is blonde and has light eyes, and my whole family looks like that. I think deep down, I already knew this was my history, and that's probably why I didn't want to do it."
Hostin went on to share that after talking with Gates, 73, she had a conversation with her mother about their ancestry.
"And when I spoke to my mom about it, she was really disappointed — she actually cried," Hostin said. "And then she said, ‘Maybe that’s why I have been so connected to Black culture, because it's an atonement in my spirit.'"
Hostin, who also revealed to her co-hosts that she had discovered Anthony Ramos from Hamilton is a cousin, continued to explain on The View how this experience led her to connect with new members of her family on her father's side.
"I also discovered that on my father’s side, the grandfather I thought was mine was not actually my grandfather. There was someone else, so we are getting to know that family, and I have five uncles and aunts that I didn’t know about," she said. "And that’s pretty exciting, and my father now has five siblings that he didn’t know about, and he’s the oldest, so I thought that was great."
When Sara Haines asked how the news has "changed" her, Hostin said she was "deeply disappointed" at first and has received emails and texts "saying that I’m a white girl and that I don’t deserve reparations."
In response, Whoopi Goldberg encouraged that person to "clean off your television screen."
"I still believe this country has a lot to do in terms of racial justice. But what I can say, Sara, in response to your question, is that I feel enriched by knowing that history," Hostin shared, "I feel enriched knowing that my family has come a long way, from being enslavers to my mother marrying my father in 1968." I feel enriched by it."
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