The View From the Ivory Tower: Sunny Hostin’s Privilege Problem

Sunny Hostin’s Privilege Problem (And the Ancestors Who Would Like a Word)

I want to start with a confession. I do not watch The View. I have a job, a family of six, a stack of Anatomy quizzes to grade, and generally better things to do with an hour of my life than listen to five women agree with each other very loudly. But every so often the internet drags a clip across my desk that I simply cannot ignore, and this one has EVERYTHING — hypocrisy, genealogy, railroad tracks, and a lecture on privilege delivered by a woman who apparently skipped the chapter on her own family history. So grab some coffee. This is a long one, and it is worth it.

PART ONE — “NOBODY IS ABOVE THE LAW” (UNLESS IT IS MY KID)

Sunny Hostin has built a decade-plus television career on one repeated refrain: nobody is above the law. She has said it about presidents. She has said it about political enemies. She has said it with the confidence of a woman who used to be a federal prosecutor and wants you to know it, ideally within the first ninety seconds of any conversation.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when reporting from the New York Post, TMZ, and Page Six all landed on the same basic story: her 24-year-old son was cited for trespassing on active Metro-North railroad tracks in Westchester County, and according to multiple accounts, the situation escalated when Hostin got involved by phone, reportedly making sure the responding officers understood exactly who they were dealing with. A letter to the assistant DA followed, one that leaned heavily on the young man’s Harvard pedigree and clean record to argue the citation should simply disappear.

Here is my question, and I ask it as a teacher who has spent 23 years telling students that rules apply to everyone in the room, including the kid whose parents donate to the boosters: if “nobody is above the law” is the principle, does that principle come with an asterisk the moment it is YOUR family standing on the tracks? Because from where I am sitting, that looks less like a principle and more like a talking point that gets suspended whenever it becomes personally inconvenient.

Quinn’s Law Number Two states that if you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing. For years the accusation aimed at the right has been “you think the rules do not apply to your own.” Fascinating, then, to watch that exact behavior show up the moment the cameras were not rolling.

PART TWO — THE FLAG THAT MAKES HER NERVOUS

While we are here, let us revisit Hostin’s other recent contribution to American discourse: that walking into a community and seeing American flags sometimes makes her feel unsafe, because she associates the flag with a “section of this country” that has supposedly weaponized it into a symbol of white supremacy.

I have a great deal of respect for the flag. I carried its meaning with me as a combat medic. I have watched it draped over caskets of people I served with. So forgive me if I find it a little rich that a woman whose son attends Harvard, whose family has been featured in People magazine showing off a home most Americans could not afford in three lifetimes, and who draws a network salary large enough to make Disney’s shareholders nervous, wants to explain to the rest of us who the real victims of America are.

What’s next, I wonder? Maybe next she tells us the Betsy Ross flag is a hate symbol too… wait, that horse already left the barn a few election cycles ago.

PART THREE — THE ANCESTOR REVEAL NOBODY SAW COMING

Here is where the story stops being a simple “celebrity privilege” piece and becomes something genuinely instructive, because in 2024 Hostin appeared on PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr., a show that researches celebrity genealogy. Researchers traced her mother’s Puerto Rican and Spanish ancestry back to Galicia, and the findings were not what she expected. A fourth-great-grandfather was, according to the show’s research, likely connected to the slave trade in early nineteenth-century Spain. His son — Hostin’s third-great-grandfather — reportedly owned at least one enslaved person, with family records tracing the movement of enslaved people to Puerto Rico as restrictions tightened elsewhere.

By all accounts Hostin was visibly stunned. She had thought of herself, in her own words, as simply “half Puerto Rican,” not descended from Spanish slaveholders. She has since referred to that branch of her family as “enslavers” on air and called the discovery “deeply disappointing” — while continuing to voice support for reparations.

Meanwhile, on her father’s side, her third-great-grandfather was born into slavery in Georgia around 1835 and later registered to vote after emancipation.

Sit with that for a second. One family tree. One branch enslaved. One branch enslaving. This is not a gotcha invented by conservative media — it is a fact pattern PBS itself put on the air. And it is, whether Hostin intended it or not, the single best illustration available of why the entire “privilege equals skin color” framework collapses the moment you actually look at genealogy instead of assuming it.

PART FOUR — “BLACK SLAVE TRADER PRIVILEGE” AND WHY THE MATH NEVER WORKS

I want to be precise here, because precision matters and I am not in the business of inventing accusations. Nobody is claiming Sunny Hostin personally owned or traded human beings. She was born in the 1960s. The claim is much simpler and much more interesting: the modern “privilege” narrative insists you can read someone’s place in the oppressor/oppressed hierarchy off their skin color alone. Hostin’s own ancestry, confirmed on national television, proves that framework is fiction. Slavery was not a one-directional, one-race, one-continent institution. It was a universal human failing practiced on every inhabited continent, by every ethnicity, for most of recorded history.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. himself has acknowledged on record that African kingdoms — in places like Dahomey, Ghana, and Angola — waged wars specifically to capture people from rival tribes and sell them into the transatlantic trade. European traders largely stayed on the coast; the capturing was frequently done by other Africans. None of this excuses the horror of the institution. It simply means the “one side is eternally guilty, one side is eternally owed” model of history does not survive contact with actual historical scholarship — including the scholarship PBS put in front of Sunny Hostin’s own face.

This is where the math in any comprehensive reparations scheme falls apart. If we are compensating descendants of the enslaved, do we also bill descendants of the enslavers within the SAME family tree? Does Hostin owe herself money? Do the roughly one million white Europeans enslaved by Barbary pirates over three centuries get a line in the ledger? Do the 360,000 Union soldiers who died ending American slavery get a rebate for their sacrifice? Once you try to apply the principle consistently, nearly the entire population of the planet becomes simultaneously a debtor and a creditor, the checks cancel each other out, and you are left with an administrative nightmare that heals nothing and enriches only the consultants who get hired to run it.

Quinn’s Law Number Six tells us that facts are the enemy of liberalism. This is Exhibit A. The genealogical facts of Sunny Hostin’s own family do not fit the tidy morality play she has spent a career narrating on national television, so the facts simply do not get discussed on The View the way, say, a Republican’s ancestry might be mined for gotchas. Quinn’s Law Number Sixteen adds the other half of the picture: liberals view the world the way they think it should be, not the way it actually is. The world, as it turns out, is a great deal messier — and more interesting — than a green room talking point.

None of this erases the real, documented, shameful history of chattel slavery in this country, a history the Republican Party was founded in 1854 specifically to fight, and for which Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments while the Democratic Party of that era enforced Jim Crow for another century. That history deserves to be taught honestly, in full, without the sanitized version some of these dead-from-the-neck-up talking heads prefer. But honest history cuts every which way, and Sunny Hostin’s own family tree is proof.

PART FIVE — A WORD ON “PRIVILEGE,” GENERALLY

If “privilege” simply means an unearned head start — money, connections, institutional access — then by any honest measure Sunny Hostin is one of the most privileged people currently on American television. Ivy League son. Multimillion-dollar home. A national platform to broadcast her opinions into tens of millions of living rooms every single weekday. The ability to get a New York City police officer on speakerphone with her network affiliation attached before the citation was even finished being written. That is not the profile of an oppressed person. That is the profile of someone standing about as close to the top of the American pyramid as a person can get without owning a professional sports franchise.

I do not say this to be cruel. I say it because consistency is not optional if you want to be taken seriously as a moral authority. You cannot lecture a nation about systemic unfairness from a position of maximum personal privilege and expect nobody to notice the gap between the sermon and the pew you are sitting in.

PART SIX — A FEW WORDS ON HOW TO ACTUALLY INTERACT WITH A POLICE OFFICER

Since a large part of this story is about a young man’s encounter with law enforcement, I want to use the moment for something genuinely useful, because I have spent 23 years as an Army combat medic and civilian paramedic working directly alongside law enforcement on some of the worst nights of people’s lives, and I have opinions on this that have nothing to do with politics.

If you find yourself stopped by a police officer, whether you are on railroad property, on the side of a highway, or anywhere else:

Keep your hands visible. Do not reach for anything until you are asked to, and narrate what you are doing before you do it (”my ID is in my back pocket, may I reach for it”).
Stay calm and be respectful. Officers are doing a job, often with very little information about who they are dealing with in the first ten seconds of an encounter. Your tone in those first ten seconds matters enormously.
Do not argue the law on the roadside. If you believe the stop or citation was unjustified, that argument belongs in court, in front of a judge, not shouted at the officer standing in front of you. Comply first, contest later.
Dropping names, titles, or “do you know who I am” almost never helps and frequently makes things worse. Let the facts of the situation speak for themselves.
Let them do their job. Officers enforce rules that exist for reasons that are not always obvious in the moment — in this case, active railroad tracks that kill people who wander onto them.
And for the love of all that is holy, DO NOT TRY TO RUN THEM OVER. If you are behind the wheel of a vehicle during any interaction with law enforcement, keep both hands on the wheel where they can be seen, follow instructions, and never, under any circumstance, treat your vehicle as a weapon or an escape route. That decision ends careers, ends lives, and ends badly for everyone involved, always.

None of that is a partisan position. It is just good sense, and it will get you home safely far more often than a phone call to your famous mother will.

CLOSING THOUGHT

I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for a police citation that, by every account, amounted to little more than a fine. I am asking for consistency. If the rule is “nobody is above the law,” then apply it to your own household before you apply it to your political opponents. If the rule is “check your privilege,” then check your own zip code, tuition bill, and Rolodex before you check anyone else’s skin color. And if you are going to build a career narrating America’s sins, be prepared for America to occasionally hand you a mirror — even, apparently, via PBS.

But what do I know? I am only a medically retired combat medic and a science teacher who believes a fact is a fact regardless of which cable network is holding the microphone when it shows up.

IF THIS ARTICLE MADE YOU THINK: LIKE this article so the algorithm shows it to people who need to read it. SHARE this — every share really helps get the word out. Use it. COMMENT below with your take. Do you think “privilege” should be measured by bank account and zip code, or by skin color? Tell me.

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Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.

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