New York Post: ‘The View’s’ Sunny Hostin opens up about racial identity crisis in new book

By Marisa Dellatto

Sunny Hostin is asked “the question” three times a week.

“Just this week I posted something on Instagram and someone commented, ‘Is Sunny Puerto Rican or black?,'” “The View” co-host told The Post.

It’s a question she’s heard her whole life. “People would stare at me, they would call me a zebra,” the lawyer and journalist said.

The former CNN analyst explores her biracial background and rise through the media ranks in her new book, “I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds” (Harper One), out Tuesday.

Judgment about her race happens at work, too. “It really irritated me,” she writes, referring to colleagues who tell her she isn’t black enough or Latina enough.

Hostin, whose full first name is Asunción, grew up “really poor” in the South Bronx to a Puerto Rican mother and black father who were both teenagers when they had her. “There were days they couldn’t pay the electric bill and the gas bill. I didn’t have heat, I didn’t have hot water,” she said.

“The Loving [v. Virginia] decision allowing interracial couples to get married came down in 1967. I was born in ’68,” she said. “It sounds so weird now, but my father told me just recently that [I’m] the first person on [his] side of the family to enjoy full civil rights.”

Though she remembers a childhood “filled with laughter and love,” playing in the spray from fire hydrants and going to museums, the struggles and violence she experienced helped her forge a career in the courtroom — and eventually on TV.

In one particularly harrowing incident when she was just 7, Hostin witnessed her uncle get stabbed. “It certainly shaped why I went into criminal law and why I wanted to be a prosecutor because I wanted to make sure that when bad things happen, people [are held] accountable.”

Hostin graduated from the Upper East Side’s prestigious Dominican Academy at 16. That year, she started college at SUNY Binghamton on a full scholarship. After attending Notre Dame Law School, Hostin worked as an assistant US attorney, before becoming a legal analyst for Court TV, FOX, CNN and then ABC. She joined “The View” in 2016.

Though she’s always told the stories of others, the three-time Emmy winner found it challenging to turn the focus on herself.

Read the full story at NYPost.com.

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