Netflix is canceling several animated projects, including Ibrahim X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby,” as the streaming service was forced to cut costs and lay off workers due to dwindling subscriber numbers.
Ava DuVernay’s animated project “Wings of Fire” also received the ax, according to Variety, which cited sources as saying the decision was creative rather than financial.
Netflix recently announced that it was laying off 150 workers, or about 2% of its workforce, after reporting low revenue in the first quarter of this year.
The streaming service lost 200,000 customers during that time – the first time in a decade that the company hasn’t added paying users.
Kendi, a Boston University professor and best-selling author, is controversial because of his advocacy of “anti-racism.”
His bestseller, ‘How to be an anti-racist,’ became a hit following protests that erupted following the fatal arrest of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, in Minneapolis two years ago .
“Antiracist Baby,” which is based on the book also written by Kendi, was intended to be a series of animated vignettes set to music for preschoolers.
Kendi has drawn controversy for past statements about white people.
Last month, he called Republicans “a party of white supremacy.” In an op-ed for The Atlantic, he wrote that the GOP used “dog whistles” to market itself as the “parents’ party,” dismissing it as a “myth, big myth.”
Kendi also claimed the GOP had “harbored white supremacists” as they spearheaded “the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time” with the Jan. 6 siege on Capitol Hill.
In September 2020, he faced calls to be fired after suggesting Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett was a “white colonizer” who uses her two adopted Haitian children as “props.”
“Some white colonizers ‘adopted’ black children,” he wrote. “They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ way of white people, while using them as props in their images of denial throughout their lives, while cutting off the biological parents of these children from the picture of humanity.”