“The View” host Sunny Hostin revealed on the PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots” that Nancy Grace is responsible for her stage name. Hostin’s birth name is Asunción Cummings, but she said Grace “struggled” to pronounce it on air and went ahead and changed it to “Sunny” almost immediately after Hostin told her that’s what some of her friends called her growing up. Hostin appeared alongside Grace on Court TV back in the day.
“She struggled, every take,” Hostin said (via Entertainment Weekly). “It was just so crazy. She couldn’t get it. Then she said, at the break, ‘Can I say something to you?’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ She was like, ‘Do you have another name? A nickname?’ 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.’”
“I said, ‘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,’” Hostin continued. “The next segment, I was Sunny Hostin.”
Hostin added that “all of a sudden, people remembered who I was” as soon as her professional name was changed to “Sunny.” She noticed her “career took off” in a way it hadn’t when she was using her Spanish birth name, which says “something about our world” and how it views minorities.
Elsewhere during the “Finding Your Roots” episode, “The View” host learned that some of her family is actually from Spain and were slaveholders. She had previously thought both sides of her family were from Puerto Rico.
“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 said. “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. I guess it’s a fact of life that this is how some people made their living, on the backs of others.”
Watch a clip from Hostin’s episode of “Finding Your Roots” in the social media post below.
