Sunny Hostin and Don Lemon Overcoming self-doubt

CALL ME BY MY NAME

Old friends Sunny Hostin and Don Lemon discuss identity, success, and just when is the right time to change your name.

“WHAT ARE YOU?” THAT’S A QUESTION

that has followed Sunny Hostin throughout her life as a half Puerto Rican and half African-American woman. She and CNN’s Don Lemon discuss racial identity and injustice. From the September 29, 2020, online program “Sunny Hostin with Don Lemon: Identity, Race and Justice in America.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation SUNNY HOSTIN, Co-Host, “The View”; Author, I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds In Conversation with DON LEMON, Anchor, “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon”

DON LEMON: It is my pleasure to welcome my very dear friend Sunny Hoston, Emmy Award-winning legal journalist and cohost of “The View.” Sunny grew up in the South Bronx and through hard work, determination and the support of her parents, her family, she obtained a law degree. She went on to become a federal prosecutor and was soon recognized for her stellar work prosecuting crimes against women and children. She is a fighter. She is in it to help people.

After leaving the court, she went to Notre Dame Law School. She suddenly became a television legal analyst and was one of the first national reporters to cover Trayvon Martin’s death. She broke ground with that. She continues to use her platform to be an advocate for social justice and to provide a powerful voice to the marginalized and voiceless people of this world.

So tell me, why did you decide to write ? SUNNY HOSTIN: I just feel that the truth of it all is that you do hold the power to be the difference. I’ve always believed that. We’re in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis, a national debate over policing, what I think is a delayed reckoning with systemic racism. I have been journaling for so long and had been writing, and I thought, “If not now, when?”

I had spoken to [U.S. Supreme Court Associate] Justice [Sonia] Sotomayer—that sounds like a huge name drop, but it’s the truth. I had spoken to her a lot about sharing my story, and my story, as you know, Don, has more failures than success. I thought, Is it time to share that, warts and all? Because my story is painful—[I] grew up in the South Bronx projects with teenage parents. Do I want to share all of that? Is it hopeful enough? Is it aspirational enough? And she said, “You’ve got to share it, because it is, and it can be the story for other people. And promise me one thing: You do it in Spanish and in English,” because it’s so important for those people that may be struggling with English as their second language— and English is my second language—with everything that’s going on in the world, do that for the little girl, for the little boy that will read it in Spanish. LEMON: I’m sure you thought, What are people going to learn from me? As everyone who’s writing a book [thinks], right? They do that. Especially when you have the humility, when you’re as humble as you are, you wonder like, Is anyone going to care about what I write? What can I offer? You said you have more failures than you have successes, but people don’t realize that’s kind of how life goes, right? You take those failures and those are building blocks to the successes. But why did you feel that way? HOSTIN: Absolutely. It’s the age of social

“I get messages like, ‘You’re talking about income inequality, poverty and the struggle. You’re sitting on “The View.” You’re wealthy. You don’t know anything about it.’”

—SUNNY HOSTIN

media. So I get immediate feedback every time I’m on the show. I try to be a voice for the voiceless, ’cause that seat on “The View” is so very important. I would get these messages like, “You’re talking about income

Photo facing page: Sunny Hostin at a tribute to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who received The LBJ Foundation’s award honoring those who right wrongs, champion justice and serve humanity. (Photo by LBJ Foundation/Jay Godwin.)

inequality, and you’re talking about poverty and you’re talking about the struggle. You’re sitting on ‘The View,’ you’re wealthy. You don’t know anything about it.” I just remember thinking people don’t know my story. They don’t know how hard it’s been. LEMON: They see you on “The View” and they think, “Oh, overnight success.” HOSTIN: Yes, decades. I’ve been a lawyer for 25 years. I’ve been on television for a long time. This is just the success you’re seeing, but you’re not seeing the failures. And there’ve just been so many of them, LEMON: Usually I like to use my haters as motivators and my failures as building blocks. So what did you learn from those failures? HOSTIN: I’ve learned a tremendous amount of resilience. My father used to always say, “You have to be twice as good to go half as far.” I’ve learned that no one can take excellence from you. So every time I’ve been fired, and there’ve been many times—at CNN, there was one time my contract wasn’t renewed, but I knew that I had done my best, that I have been excellent. So I could leave with my head up. And I learned that there would be another day. I learned to use my voice, that it was OK. I learned that humility is OK. I actually also learned recently that I’m not as good at sticking up for myself as I am at sticking up for others. LEMON: Who told you that? HOSTIN: My husband told me, and you did. LEMON: Sunny’s and my offices used to be right across from each other, and we would often look to each other for advice and comfort and feedback. But go on, Sunny. HOSTIN: You’ve often said, “Lean in, Sunny . . . you don’t stick up for yourself,” and it’s so true. I write in the book how it’s really easy to stick up for other people, to tell other people’s stories. It’s certainly was really hard for me to tell this story, because I wasn’t only telling my story. I was telling the story of my parents. I was telling my mother’s story. My mother didn’t speak to me for about a week after she read the book. Because I talk about addiction, I talk about mental health, and I bear a lot of secrets in that sense.

I found that, my goodness, I did not want to talk about possible discrimination. I did not want to raise my hand and say, “This is happening to me. Is this true? Don’t treat me this way. I should be valued more.” I did not want to do those things! I found that out about myself, which was a little bit shocking that I talked the talk and I can defend other people and prosecute cases and stick up for victims, but it was really hard for me to do it for myself. LEMON: Okay. I have to just pick up on something that you said, because I think being where we are in this business, there’s a lot of advice that we can offer people that’s [useful] not just in this business, but just in professional life anywhere. You said that you wouldn’t stick up for yourself. Oftentimes when you get to these positions—and we know as you get up, it’s a pyramid, it’s rarefied air there, very few of these kinds of jobs—you want to stick up for yourself, you want to stick up for other people, but then you worry that if I do that, am I going to lose my platform? And therefore there won’t be anyone like me with this voice. Was that part of it. HOSTIN: It was a huge consideration. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get an email or a tweet—you know, when preCOVID I’d be on the street and mothers and even young people would come up to me and say, “Oh my God, thank you for being who you are. You represent me.” That meant a lot for me. I thought if I stick my neck out, even for myself, there won’t be someone like me on “The View” or on television.

One of the reasons that I always wanted to be a broadcast journalist—you know, we didn’t watch a lot of television when I was growing up. We had one TV in the house, and I read a lot of books, but we didn’t watch a lot of TV. What we did watch was “60 Minutes.” We watched it every Sunday, religiously, and I would pretend to be one of the reporters. But there weren’t any that look like me, and my parents were like, “Don’t do that, because you’re not going to be able to feed yourself.” So I remember the power of representation. The thought that I would take a chance and risk being that representation for those people that would stop me on the street was nerve wracking. I remember asking my family when I was typing the foreword—I typed it in like 25 minutes, because it just poured out of me—I remember thinking, “Is this smart?” I showed it to my husband and I said, “This is professional suicide, right?” And he was like, “Yeah, possibly.” [Laughter.] I was like, “No, lose my job, right?” He was like, “Maybe.” I did it anyway, because I leaned in like you often tell me, because I felt like, my goodness—pandemic, economic crisis, national debate over policing— LEMON: —African Americans and people of color affected more by this crisis— HOSTIN: —and I don’t have the courage to do what I talk about every day on the show from a privileged position. I would be a hypocrite. LEMON: There you go. The reason I knew that I can so relate to you, because you remember when I came out— HOSTIN: I remember we talked about it, and you wrote about it in a book, LEMON: I was going to lose my job; I’m never going to work in this business again. And I leaned in, and it was the total right thing to do. I always tell people to live in their own truth. You’re living in your own truth. Is that where that name [of your book] comes from—I Am These Truths? Where did that come from? HOSTIN: I came up with the title of the book after it was written. In my home office at my desk where I did a lot of the writing, I have all these stickies with things on it. I have quotes from the Constitution. LEMON: Do you remember I used to keep a copy of the Constitution on my desk? HOSTIN: Exactly. It says, “We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal.” I just started thinking about all the themes in the book, about equality, systemic racism, and pay and equity. And I was like, I’m finally telling the truth, and these are my truths.

I hope it encourages people to not be ashamed of where they come from and just tell the truth. I was like, “Wow, I am these truths.” That’s where it came from, because it’s very powerful to say that the truth of it all is that we are equal and that we hold the power to be the difference. LEMON: People of color, immigrants—you are the American story. So when someone tries to otherize immigrants and people of color it’s doubly insulting, because of the work that people of color did—no pay, slavery, all those things, building things. So when people try to otherize you and make you feel like you’re not an American, is that infuriating for you? HOSTIN: It’s painful. It used to make me angry, but now it’s painful. One of the things that I thought about when I was writing the book, [was] why do people still question my background, my ethnicity—why is it so odd? When I was writing it, it had just come up again. We had interviewed a family on the show, and it was a Spanish-speaking family. One of the family members, the

“Oftentimes when you get to [senior] positions, it’s rarefied air, very few of these kinds of jobs. So you want to stick up for yourself, you want to stick up for other people, but then you wonder, ‘If I do that, am I going to lose my platform?’”

CNN host Don Lemon.

—DON LEMON

little bit, but not as much as you. I wrote in my book grandmother, didn’t speak English. So I about the experience in Louisiana, the conducted the interview of her in Spanish, Brown paper bag, light skin versus dark skin. and I would translate for the audience. I’ve [Lemon is referring to a rumor that CNN had got all these noxious tweets like, “Sunny a test for anchors that their skin couldn’t be must be Spanish today. Why is she speaking darker than a brown paper bag or they would with a Spanish accent?” And it was just that I not be accepted by viewers.—Ed.] In the was pronouncing the words properly. winter I was light skinned, so I could hang

I realized that my parents got married in out with the light-skinned Black folk. Then 1968, just a year after the Loving decision in the summer I was dark skinned, some when interracial couples were allowed to weird color thing. be married. My mom [is] a white Hispanic, I remember when we had this conversation also Jewish descent. My father’s a black guy. [in which you said], “Don, you realize that When they got married, it had just become people on CNN, they don’t know that I’m legal. I was like a unicorn. There really Latina. They just think in terms of African weren’t people that look like me. So people American and white, Black and white.” kind of stare at our family. They tried to live And I said, “Well, Sunny, let people know in Georgia, which is really kind of crazy, and that you’re Latina. It’s okay to be.” You felt the KKK ran them out of town. So for me, stuck in that world, in a no man’s land. Am I had been otherized my entire life, even I this? Am I that? Am I kind of both like, do I though I’m only in my fifties; it was just have to choose? unusual. So I think that is why I’ve lived that HOSTIN: I did. It was for a lot of reasons, life of a struggle of identity. and it was weird, because our offices were

But it saddens me that 50 years later, people right next to CNN en Español. [Laughter.] still question it, because they still want to put They never asked me to do any reporting. you in this box. I don’t understand. I was like, That’s kind of weird. I think LEMON: Well, people have to be able to one of the reasons, and I blame myself, is categorize something in order to feel like they because I changed my name. My real name’s have to be comfortable. I can understand a Asunción. LEMON: So how did it morph? Did you morph to make it more American or cuter or friendlier? HOSTIN: I’ve always been Asunción, my family calls me Asunción, and my friends from back in the day all call me Asunción. When I was in college, there were a couple of people that would say, “A-a-a-” [having trouble pronouncing it] and I noticed it, so I would say, “You can call me whatever you want.” They’d say, “How about Sunshine?” I’d say, “Okay, that’s fine.” When I started doing Court TV with Nancy Grace, who is a great friend of mine, she could not pronounce my name. And when I say could not, the struggle was real. She would be like, “and joining me is the cohost today [mumbles incoherently].”

You could see the struggle. At one of the breaks, she said, “Can I say something to you?” I said, “Yes, Nancy, what would you like to say?” I knew what it was about. She said, “This name thing. This Asunción; no one can pronounce it. They can’t say it.” I said, “Well, what would you like me to do about my name, Nancy?” She said, “Do you have a nickname?” I felt the pressure at that point, when I have this legal legend telling me this name is not going to cut it. I said, “A lot of people call me Sunny.” Then she said,

“Change the chyron: Sunny—S-U-N-N-Y.” I just went with it, to be honest with you. I didn’t like it, but I went with it. And after that, my career kind of took off. [Grace] knows TV. LEMON: Sometimes people get offended [by such offers of help], but sometimes people just are looking out for your wellbeing. And she was like, “This will work for you because I know TV.” HOSTIN: That’s what she told me LEMON: So sometimes you have to roll with it and lean in. HOSTIN: Don always tells me to lean in. She said, “You’re going to make it in this business. I haven’t seen anyone do this as well as you, without any training. You were made to do this, but that name is going to hold you back. People can’t remember it.” And I got to tell you, she was right, but I felt like I sold a piece of myself. My grandmother never forgave me for it, because I was named after her sister. People would sort of stop me when I was with her and say, “Hi, Sunny.” And she would be like, “No, Sunny!” and it would infuriate her. I do think that at CNN, if I were Asunción Hostin, just like Soledad O’Brien, people would have known my identity. So I kind of did that to myself. If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have changed my name. I would not have, and I can’t go back now. Everybody knows me now. LEMON: When I was a reporter, when I left New York and went to Birmingham, my first news director said she wanted me to change my name. She didn’t like the last name Lemon. I knew in TV, like if it’s snappy and something that people can remember, it’s great. I’m like, Don Lemon, that’s a name that people change their name to for TV. She wanted it to be like Don Clark, Don Johnson, something really simple. No one will ever remember that, but everyone will remember Don Lemon. Everyone remembers Sunny.

You talk about [how] you were too lightskinned for the Black community, too dark skinned [for other communities]; people didn’t get it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1936 in an essay—it’s called “The Crack-Up”— “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Why do you think it’s so hard for people, even intelligent people that you’ve worked with in the past, to understand that someone can be Black and Latina? HOSTIN: It’s really fascinating, isn’t it? I mean, look at Barack Obama. The president is half Black and half white, but nobody can really reconcile that. I think a lot of it has to do with the history of this country—the one-drop rule, where if you were one drop Black, you were considered Black. LEMON: Wait, can we just talk about that for a little bit? That one drop was important, because you could be 99.9 percent something else, but if you had just a smidge of Black in you, you were— HOSTIN: You were Black. And because of that history in the country, legal documents reflect that. Race is just a social construct anyway. So my life experience reflected that. On my birth certificate, it says Black, and then it also says Hispanic, which is interesting. I looked back at it, and it says “mother: white.” Interesting. When you would fill out any standardized test, you had to choose Black, white, or Hispanic, and I would sometimes try to circle everything, and it would reject the form. LEMON: Of course you did. [Laughter.] HOSTIN: I think, again, it just goes back to the history of our country and the way people are indoctrinated to this day. I remember feeling if I choose one, does that mean my mother doesn’t exist, or if I choose the other, does that mean my father doesn’t exist—and who I am in all my complexity? I really believe that it is unique to this country, because I’ve traveled a lot of places, and I’m accepted in more complexity in those other places than I am here. LEMON: That is an American thing. I think that personifies what we’re going through right now. People who have to put you in a box. Even now, people want to put you in a box. Everyone is so divided. There’s no nuance, because people could not understand Sunny when we were on CNN together. Like you can hold two thoughts at the same time; Sunny and I could just

“People are always shocked that Meghan McCain and I are friends. Even though we battle it out on-air, we can go out and drink later.”

—SUNNY HOSTIN

go at it on TV. “I completely disagree with you.” “What is wrong?” “Why do you think that?” Then we would go have a drink later. It’s like, people can’t do that anymore? What is it about the country and society that can’t hold two thoughts at the same time, opposing views? HOSTIN: It is worse than it’s ever been. I remember sort of honing that skill when I prosecuted cases at the Justice Department, I would argue to the death in the courtroom. If you were the defense attorney, you knew when I walked in, I needed to win because I was prosecuting child sex crimes. I felt that I was on the white horse, and I was coming in to save the day and you stood in my way. I went to the wall with it. We would argue, and then we’d go out for drinks.

Some of these defense attorneys were my closest friends, much like you and I are dear friends. We would battle on CNN, much like we do on “The View.” People are always shocked that Meghan [McCain, fellow “The View” host] and I are friends. Even though we may battle it out and say all kinds of crazy things to each other on-air, we can go out and drink our bourbon later. Unfortunately I think that that kind of respect for difference of opinion is gone in our country right now. It’s just gone. This kind of relationship that we have requires a respect for a difference of opinion. LEMON: Level of forgiveness and understanding of being curious rather than judgmental. HOSTIN: It definitely requires intellectual curiosity. A lot of people, unfortunately, don’t have that, and they certainly don’t have a respect for difference of opinion. When you talk about intellectual curiosity, what that means in my view is, “Why is this person saying that? And what experience has led this person to say that?”

So I see value in that there is always value in a different opinion and how that person got to it, if only for you to strengthen your feelings about something else, the opposite opinion, if only to make you feel that way. For some reason we can’t do that anymore. I would point to the relationship that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had with Justice Scalia. You read their opinions and some of their dissents, and you would think they hated each other. LEMON: That one’s hard for me, because I know, like some curiosity, but sometimes I’m like, okay, well, they’re making law. HOSTIN: They went out to lunch together every Friday. They were quite fond of each other, but they didn’t agree on anything. LEMON: Yup. I think we need more of it. I do.

I left out a very important part, that your dad also had to change his name in the ’70s. And then here you are in the 2000s having to change your name. Did you talk to him? HOSTIN: Yeah. He did it, and we call it code switching. Now, you know, there are all these words for it. LEMON: You know what’s weird though, Sunny? Code switch is like you talk to people one way, and then [speak another way to others]. But after a while, if you get to a certain position, it all kind of becomes one thing and you just do it. Like it’s much more natural now. I find now it doesn’t surprise people when, like I told Chris [Cuomo] the other night on the air, I’m like, “You stupid.” [Laughter.] And I was like, I know that is not proper English, but I that’s how we talk to each other. HOSTIN: It’s true. When my parents were coming up, it’s now the early ’70s and this interracial couple, they’re trying to get an apartment in Manhattan, trying to get out of the South Bronx. They’ve got me, I’ve just been skipped a grade, my school can’t really teach me properly. I’ve seen my uncle get stabbed in front of me. They’re like, “We’ve got to get out of the projects.” So they start trying to interview together for apartments. And the minute they show up, the apartment’s no longer available.

My mother’s name is Rosa, her maiden name was Rosa Beza. So she realizes, “If I change Rosa to Rose”—and my father’s name is [William] Cummings—”if I become Rose Cummings, and I show up with my light hair and my light eyes, I’m going to get the apartment if I show up alone.”

My father realizes when he sends his resume out as an I.T. guy, if he uses Willy Moses Cummings, there ain’t a lot of white guys named Willie Moses. But if he changes it to Bill Cummings, William Cummings, he’s going to get the job. So he changed his name to Bill Cummings and my mother changed her name to Rose Cummings. We got the apartment in Manhattan, and he got the job. That’s just the way it was. What saddens my dad is that we still do it today. It shouldn’t be that way. But it is. LEMON: There’s a little bit of difference. I understand how you feel about your name, trust me, and especially because of your grandmother. You know, it’s ownership. They’re proud of you as a, can I say Blatina? HOSTIN: Blatina, right. [Laughter.] AfroLatina. LEMON: But you did it because Sunny was just easy and it was perfect and it fit. But I understand if you’re looking back, you have the success that you have, you wouldn’t have to change your name. It’s a different time now.

I want to ask you, when you look at what’s happening now, this racial reckoning—I call it the summer of George Floyd, the summer of unrest—if you could go back and tell your younger self, in the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting [in Kenosha, Wisconsin], what would you tell yourself back when you were reporting about Trayvon Martin or back when you were entering law school or back when you were entering news television? What would you say? HOSTIN: You know, when I was younger, I definitely thought that if you did the excellent work that you would succeed. I think that was a very simplistic way of looking at things.

I think if I’m being honest in the seat that I sit in right now, I would advise my younger self that it isn’t a meritocracy and to be ready for that. It isn’t just working really hard and being excellent. They help, but it isn’t just meritocracy, and that indeed you do have to look out for those potholes and you do have to in a sense play the game and be more strategic. Like you always advise me to do.

Be more strategic. And certainly be more of an advocate for yourself, I think I would tell myself. I often thought that that it’s only about the work, and it’s just not. There’s a bigger picture there.