Hello everyone and welcome to todays ritual commonwealth program. My name is don lemon and ill be your moderator for today. Im excited to do this but i have a few things before we announce our beautiful wonderful sunny hostin. As the club continues tohost Virtual Events they are grateful for your virtual support and their members and donors so we hope youll consider making a donation. You can do it online or text donate. 415 329 4231. And you can text the word donate to thatnumber. We also like to think of barnyard osha foundation for supporting todays good lit events. It is my pleasure right now, my just overwhelming, deep , deeply i cant even tell you how much i love this woman but its my pleasure to welcome my very dear friend sunny hostin, awardwinning legal journalist and the coast of the view. I worked with sunny many years and we talked about so much, were like sisters and brothers and we fight butits all love. Her new book is called, here it is, i am these truths. Its an memoir ofinjustice, identity and living between worlds. The revealing her incredible story. Sunny grew up in the south bronx and through determination and the support of her parents and family she obtained a lot of degree. Went on to become a federal prosecutor and was recognized for her workasking crimes against women and children. Shes a fighter. Shes in it to do good and help people. After leading the court she went to Notre Dame Law School and after the court suddenly became a Television Legal Analyst and was one of the First National reporters to cover Trayvon Martins death. She provides a powerful voice to the marginalized and voiceless people of thisworld , really. I am thrilled to be here today to discuss her story and im going to dig into the timely themes she explores throw out her book and one more note before we get started, were going to be taking audience questions and we may do it at the end but we may do it throughout just sort of interwoven in and it depends on if something is related to whatwere talking about so submit your questions in the chat box. Sunny hostin, welcome. We have so much to talk about, how are you . Im glad to be here with you even though its virtual. I wish we were there in the same world room but im excited to be on this journey with you. Why did you decide towrite i am these truths . I just feel that the truth of it all is that you do hold the power to bethe difference. And you know that ive always believedthat. And i think that at this time we are in the middle of a pandemic, and economic crisis, a National Debate over policing. A delayed, what i think is a delayed recognizing reckoning with systemic racism and i have been journaling for so long and i had been writing and i thought if not now, when . And i have spoken to Justice Sotomayor which sounds like a huge name drop but its the truth. I had spoken to her about sharing my story and my story as you know has more failures than success. And i thought it was time to share that. Warts and all because mystory is painful. You grow up in the southbound projects with teenage parents and you want to share all of that. Is it hopeful enough, is it aspirational enough and she said youve got toshare it because it is. And it can be a story for other people and promise me one thing, you do it in spanish and in english because its so important for those people that may be struggling with english as a second language and english as you know don is my second language with everything thats goingon in the world. Do that so the little girl or little boy that will read it in spanish can have hope. Im sure you thought everyone was writing a book, they do that and especially when you have the humility, when youre as humble as you are you wonder is anyone going to care about what i write . You said you have more failures than you have successes but people dont realize its kind of how life goes. You take those failuresand those are Building Blocks to the success. Why did you feel that way . Why did you feel like you had all these failures or whatever and did you struggle withthinking no ones going to care . Absolutely and i get media feedback because im on the show and i would get, and i tried to be a voice for the voiceless because that job on the view is very important and i get these messages like youre talking about income inequality and youretalking about poverty and youre talking about the struggle. Youre getting on the view and you are wealthy and you dont know anything about it and i remember thinking they dont know. People dont know my story. They dont know how hardits been. They see you on the view and they think overnight success. Youve been working at this for decades. Ive been a lawyer over 25 years. Ive been on television for a long time. This is just the success youre seeing but youre not seeing the failures and there have just been so many of them. What did you learnfrom those failures as people are listening. I said that i like to use my haters as motivators and Building Blocks but what did you learn fromthose failures . Ive learned a tremendous amount of resilience. My father used the always say you have to be twice as good to go half as far. Ive learned that people can take excellence from you so every time ive been fired and there have been many times, at cnn my contract wasnt renewed but i knew that i had done my best. That i had been excellent, so i could leave with myhead up. And i certainly learned that and i learned that there would be another day. I learned to use my voice, that its okay. I learned humility is okay. I also learned recently that im not as good at sticking up for myself as i am at sticking up for other people. Who told you that . My husband told me. You did. I know many told you that but sunday offices used to be across from each other and we would look to each other for advice and comfort and feedback but go on sunny, sorry. Youve often said lien in sunny and you dont stick up for yourself and its so true and i write in the book how its really easy to stick up for other people, to tell other peoples stories. It certainly was hard for me to tell this story. I told the story of my parents, im telling my mothers story. My mother didnt me for about a week after she read the book actually so i talk about addiction, i talk about Mental Health and i bear a lot of secrets in that sense. And ive found that my dignity, i did not want to talk about discrimination. I didnt want to raise my hand and say this is happening to me, is this true . Dont treat me this way, i should be valued more, i did not want to do those things and i found 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 hard for me to do it for myself. I want to ask you about the title of the book but i have to speak up on something that you said because i think being where we are in this business theres a lot of advice that we can offer people thats not just in this business but in professional life anywhere. You said that you wouldnt stick up for yourself. Often times when you get to these positions appear in, there are few of these kinds of jobs so you want to stick up for people but then you worry if i do that, am i going to lose my platform and there wont be anyone like me with this voice. Was that part of it . It was a huge consideration. There is a way to both sides that i dont get an email or a tweet or you know, id be on the street and mothers and even young people would come up to me and say thank you for being who you are. You represent me. And that meant a lot for me. And then i thought, if i stick my neck out even more for myself, there wont be someone like me on the view, on television and i remember i write about in the book part of the reasons that i always wanted to be a broadcast journalist because we dont watch a lot of television when i was growing up. And i read a lot of books and we didnt watch a lot of tv. But we did watch was 60 minutes. We watched it every sunday religiously. And i would pretend to be one of the reporters but there werent any that looked like me and my parentswere like , dont do that because youre not going to be able to speak yourself so i remember the power of representation so the thought that i would take a chance and risk being that representation for those people that would stop me on the street was nerveracking and i remember asking my family when i was typing the forward, i typed it in like 25 minutes and it just poured out of me and i remember thinking is this smart . I showed it to my husband and i said this is professional suicide, right . And he said yeah, possibly. And i was like, im going to lose my job right . And he said maybe. I did it anyway. C, lean in. I leaned in like you told me because i felt mygoodness, pandemic. Economic crisis. National debate over policing. People of color are affected more by this crisis. But i dont have the courage to do what i talked about every day on the show. Your in a privileged position. From a privilegedposition, i would be a hypocrite. There you go, girl. And i can so relate to you because you remember when i came out, do you know how hard that was . I talked about it and you read about in the book. I said im never going to work in this business again and i leaned in and it was the total right thing to do. I was living, i always tell people to walk in their own truths, so youre living in your own truth , where is that where the name comes from . I am these truths, where did that come from . I came up with the titleof this book after it was written. And im in my office now, my home office at my desk where i did a lot of the writing and i have all these hippies with things on it. And. I used to keep a copy of the constitution on mydesk. The little one, exactly so says we hold these truths to be selfevident that allmen are created equal and it should be men and women. My foot is going. Sorry, go ahead. All men are createdequal and i just started thinking about all the themes in the book about equality. And systemic racism and pay inequity and i was like, im finally telling the truth. And these are my truths and i hope it encourages people to not be ashamed of where they come from and tell the truth and i was like wow, i amthese truths. Thats where it came from because its 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. You are, people of color immigrants, you are the american story. So if someone tried to on the rise immigrants and people of color its insulting because of the work that people of color did, no pay , slavery, all those things. So when people try to other eyes you and make you feel like youre not anamerican , is that infuriating for you . Its painful. It used to make me angry but now its painful. And one of the things that i thought about when i was writing the book, like why do people still question my background . My ethnicity . Why is it so odd . We had just come when i was writing it, we had just come after, it had just come up again. We interviewed a family on the show and it was a spanishspeaking family. And one of the family members, grandmother didnt speak english so i conducted the interview of her in spanish and i would train for the office and i got all these obnoxious tweets that why is she speaking with a spanish accent and it was just that i was pronouncing words properly and i realized that my parents got married in 1968, just a year after the loving decision on interracial couples were allowed to bemarried and my mom , shes a white hispanic who is also a jewish descent. And my fathers a blackeye. So when they got married they had just become legal and i was a unicorn, there were people that looked like me so people tried to live in georgia which was really kind ofcrazy and the kkk ran them out of town. And so for me, i had been other eyes myentire life , even though im only 50 and in my 50s it was just unusual so i think that is why i have lived that life of a struggle of identity but it saddens me that 50 years later, people still question it because they still want to put you in this box. People have to be able to categorize something in order to feel, to be comfortable. I can understand a little bit but not as much as you as i wrote about in my book the experience in louisiana with the brown paper bag, lightskinned versus dark skin so in the winter i was lightskinned so i could hang out with the light skinfold. It was this weird color thing but i remember when we had this conversation about your like don, you realize people on cnn theydont know that im latino. They just think in terms of africanamerican and white, black and white. And i said sunny, let people know that your latino. Its okay but you felt stuck inthat world. , that no mans land sort of an michigan this, and i both, do i have to choose one . I did and for a lot of reasons it was weird because our offices were right next to cnn and spaniel had never asked me to do any reporting. I said thats kind of weird and i think one of the reasons i write about also in the book, one of the reasons and i blame myself. Is because i changed my name. My real name. Is ascencion. Did you more to make it cuter or more american or friendlier . The story is ive always been ascencion. My family called me ascencion. My friends all called me ascencion. There were a couple of people that would say no and i noticed it so i would say you can call me whatever you want to they would say how about sunshine. Thats fine, how about sunny so they called me sunny, sunshine. When i start started doing court tv with nancy grace, she could not pronounce my name and when i say could not, the struggle was real. She would like the life jamie or the cohost today. I mean, it was just a struggle and one of the brakes she said can i Say Something to you . And i said yes nancy, what would you like to say and i knew what it was about and she said his name thing, its ascencion, i cant say. She said what would you like me to do about my name nancy and she said you have a nickname and i felt the pressure at that point when i had this legal legend telling me this name is not going to cutit. I said a lot of people call me sonny. Right then she said change the comments, sonny. She just, i didnt even have a spelling for it and she changed it and i just went with it to be honest with you. I didnt like it but i went with it and after that my career kind of took off. She knows tv. Sometimes sunny, people get offended but sometimes people just are looking out for your wellbeing and they know. She was like this willwork for you because i know tv. You just have to roll with it. Thats what she told me, god always tells me to lean in. She told me and i readabout that in the book. She said youre going to make it in this business, i havent seen anyone do this as well as you without any training. But that name is going to hold you back, people cant remember it and ive got to tell you , she was right. But i felt like i sold a piece of myself. My grandmother never gave me because i was named after her sister. People would stop me when i was with her and say its hello sonny. But it would infuriate her. And i do think that cnn if i were ascencion just like sonny obrien people would have known my identity so i kind of did that to myself and if i had to do it again i wouldnt have changed myname. You would not have to . I would not have. I know, i would not have an Everybody Knows me now. My first in when i was a reporter when i went to birmingham, she wanted me to change my name, he didnt like the last name lemmon and i knew in tv if its snappy and something people can remember its great and im like don lemon. Thats the name that you change your name to, you dont want to be don clark, don johnson, like something simple and she said no one will ever remember that. No one will remember don lemon, everyone remembers sonny. But we know who you are. I want to ask you this is you talk about you were to lightskinned for the black community, to darkskinned, people didnt get it. Im going to ask you about this quick, 1936 in an essay called the crackup, it test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still obtain the ability to function. Why is it so hard for people, even intelligent people you fork with to understand him one can beblack and latino. Its fascinating isnt it. Look at barack obama. The president s have black and half white yet nobody can really recognize reconciled. I think a lot of it has to do with the history ofthis country. But one drop rule where if you are one drop black, you were considered black. And i think i remember growing up. Can we talk about that a little, that one drop is important because you can be 99. 9 percent Something Else but if you have just a smidge of black and you, you were. You were black. And because of thathistory in the country , legal documents reflect that. And you know, race is just a social constructanyway. So my Life Experience reflected that. And so you know, on my birth certificate it says black and then it also says hispanic which i look back at and it says mother, white. And then its interesting, right. But when you were still out, any standardized test you had to choose black, white or hispanic. And iwould sometimes try to circle everything. Of course you did. Rechecked the form and i think again it just goes back to the history of our country and the way people are indoctrinated to this day. And i remember feeling if i choose one, does that mean my mother doesnt exist or if i choose the other, does that mean my father doesnt exist and who i am and all my complexity. I really believe that is unique to this country, because ive traveled a lot of places. And im expected and more complexity in those other places that i am here. That is an american thing so i think that is, that personifies what were going through right now. Who have got to put you in a box. Even now people want to put you in a box. Everyone is so divided. Theres no nuance because people could not understand when we were on cnn together like you could hold two thoughts at the same time and what is wrong, why did he think that . And we would have a drink later. What is it that people cant do that anymore . Is it about the country you think in society that can hold two thoughts ortwo opposing views . I know that now it is worse than its everbeen. And i remember some of honing that skill when i prosecuted cases. At the justice department, i read a little bit about it in the book in the sense that i would argue to the debt in the courtroom. If you were the defense attorney you knew i walked in i needed to win because i was getting and i felt that i was coming in to save the day on a white horse and you stoodin my way. And i went to the wall with it. And we would argue and then we would go out for drinks and some of these Defense Attorneys were my closest friends , much like y