“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin said Monday on the show that she and her friends had rented a cottage at a historically Black beach, which they’ve done for many years, but on July 4th, the group was verbally assaulted by teens yelling racial slurs.
“We were there celebrating, and some kids, about 20 of them, ran in front of our home, and started yelling the N-word at us,” Hostin said. “I have a video, of sort of the aftermath, when we realized they were targeting us.”
In the video, Hostin confronts the group.
“Where you the ones yelling the N-word” she asked.
They denied doing so and blamed another group of “30 people.”
“We called the police, I filed a police report,” Hostin said in the video. “The police were wonderful.”
Co-host Joy Behar asked her to explain what they were yelling about.
“They said, ‘This is America, we are patriots, this is our holiday’ — things like that,” Hostin said.
“Did you explain to them that most African Americans were here before they were” Behar asked.
“The African American community does have this feeling, many of my friends included, on July 4th because African Americans weren’t emancipated on July 4th. So they weren’t independent then.
“But this area is supposed to be a safe haven. It’s a place of pride. We found out later they targeted us specifically because of that community.”
Hostin did not name the beach, but did say the teens were not from that area.
“They came from New Jersey,” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said.
“Some from Jersey, some from parts of Long Island,” Hostin added.
“What was shocking to me was my friend Floyd, he’s an Ivy League graduate, lawyer, it ruined his week.
“We sat down, and we all started talking to him and he said, ‘This is supposed to be safe.'”
Hostin, emotional, continued.
“Then he started talking about the first time he was called the N-word.”
She said he was a football player at Columbia University and experienced a racial incident on the football field.
Goldberg said that even though the U.S. had its first Black president, Barack Obama, we do not live in a post-racial society.
“Racism, it’s in pockets, it’s in places and all you can do is face it when it hits you,” she said.
“A lot of this verbiage has been unleashed by certain people, and you know who they are,” Behar said.
“You’re not talking about old people who grew up in the Deep South,” co-host Meghan McCain added. “You’re talking about young people [on] the East Coast.”
Hostin said the group also broke her paddleboard.
“They were kind of violent,” she said.
