The View co-host Sunny Hostin said the "vast majority" of people in America is racist.
Hostin's comment was spurred by fellow co-host and former Trump administration official Alyssa Farah-Griffin, who said there were "absolutely" racist people in America, though said it was "not the vast majority of the country" during a Thursday broadcast of the program. Hostin responded by referencing a 2019 comment from GBI Director Christopher Wray claiming white supremacy was the biggest modern threat to America.
"That still doesn't mean that that's the vast majority of people," Farah-Griffin pushed back. "I just don't believe that in my day-to-day life that the people you're encountering harbor racist viewpoints."
"If you looked like me you would believe differently," Hostin said, giving Farah-Griffin a direct look as the audience applauded.
Farah-Griffin clarified her response and asked if Hostin believed the vast majority of Americans were racist.
"I think that there is a significant portion that are racist, and you can't dismiss my lived experience," Hostin said as the audience again applauded. "When I say that there are a lot of racists in this country, I just experienced my son walking down the beach being called the n-word several times in Florida."
"You can't say 'I believe that the vast majority of people aren't racist,'" Hostin added.
During a 2019 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Wray claimed white supremacy caused a significant amount of domestic terrorism in the country.
"I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we’ve investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence," Wray said. "But it does include other things as well.”
Wray said the department took domestic terrorism and hate crimes "extremely seriously" regardless of ideology.
"We are aggressively pursuing it using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners,” Wray said, adding the department's focus was on violence. “We the FBI don’t investigate the ideology, no matter how repugnant. We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we’re all over it.”
Late-last year, Wray claimed the FBI was not investigating Catholic churches, though documents obtained by the House Judicial Committee disproved Wray.
The leaked memo was titled, "Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities."
"While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, this particular field office product — disseminated only within the FBI — regarding racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI," wrote the FBI in a statement following the document's release.
The FBI added: "Any characterization that the FBI is targeting Catholics is false."
