Reparations advocate Sunny Hostin reveals moment she learned her ancestors were slaveowners: 'I'm a little bit in shock'

"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin revealed on Thursday that she recently learned that her ancestors were slaveowners.

Hostin recently appeared on PBS' "Finding Your Roots," where she learned about her ancestors. Hostin, a proponent of reparations, is proud of her heritage; she is the descendant of a Puerto Rican mother and a black father.

But she learned that her maternal ancestors are actually European — and they owned slaves.

"What I found out was that my mother's family, while they are Puerto Rican, they actually originate from Spain, and the reason that they moved to Puerto Rico is because the slave trade had been sort of canceled in Spain and then Curaçao, and then they moved all their slaves to Puerto Rico. So, the family business— I have been told that they were printers and journalists, but they were, in fact, enslavers," Hostin admitted.

The result, she explained, is precisely why she was "reluctant" to learn about her ancestry in the first place because she "sensed that there could be something ... that would be disappointing."

In her episode of "Finding Your Roots," host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Hostin what researchers discovered about her heritage.

He explained:

Our researchers discovered that her third great-grandfather Fermí­n [Beza] was the son of a merchant who was likely involved in the slave trade, and Fermí­n himself owned at least one human being. What's more, moving back on this line, we found that it originates in Galicia, Spain, evidence of Sunny's deeper ancestry and her family's ties to Spain's colonial past.

The information clearly upset Hostin.

"I'm...I'm...I'm a little bit in shock. I just always thought of myself as Puerto Rican, you know? Half Puerto Rican. I didn't think I was, uh, my family was originally from Spain and slaveholders," Hostin said.

"What, do you think all these white people [in your family] just came up out of the ground?" Gates asked.

Hostin said the news was "disappointing" because of Spain's "colonization" and because her ancestors were "enslavers."

Despite learning about her family's sordid past, Hostin declared on Thursday that she will not change her ideas about reparations.

"I still believe in reparations, by the way! So, y'all can stop texting me and emailing me and saying that I'm a white girl and I don't deserve reparations!" she said. "I still believe this country has a lot to do in terms of racial justice."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!