Sunny Hostin is sharing the story of how she went from Asunción Cummings to Sunny Hostin. The View co-host appeared on Tuesday’s Finding Your Roots on PBS, where she revealed to host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. that she changed her Spanish name after Nancy Grace had trouble pronouncing it during a Court TV appearance.
The lawyer and journalist, who is married to Emmanuel Hostin, was invited on Court TV to share some of her legal expertise with Grace, but Grace repeatedly struggled to say Asunción. “She struggled, every take,” Hostin recalled of the television appearance. “It was just so crazy. She couldn’t get it.”
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Hostin recalled that Grace “said, at the break, ‘Can I say something to you?’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ She was like, ‘Do you have another name? A nickname? I don’t know.’ And she just kept at it. 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.”
At the time, Hostin responded, “‘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,’” revealing that by “the next segment, I was Sunny Hostin.” After changing her name professionally, Hostin said her “career took off: and “all of a sudden, people remembered who I was.” Hostin would go on to appear on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, and CNN’s American Morning before being brought onto The View full-time in 2016.
During this week’s Finding Your Roots, Hostin was shocked to learn that Puerto Rican heritage on her mother’s side was mostly Spanish slaveholders. “Wow, I’m a little bit in shock. I just always thought of myself as Puerto Rican, half Puerto Rican, I didn’t think my family was originally from Spain and slaveholders,” Hostin admitted.
The TV personality’s husband was also revealed to have a shared background with her. “I think it’s actually pretty interesting that my husband and I have shared roots, so I do appreciate that, and I think it’s great for our children to know this information,” Hostin reasoned. “I guess it’s a fact of life that this is how some people made their living, on the backs of others.”
