W. Kamau Bell

That was about my mixed kids and also other mixed kids in the Oakland Bay area, which was great.

But a lot of projects got greenlit but never got made because by the time it was time to make them, we'd already had the backlash to all the DEI.

And suddenly all the DEI people got fired.

I had a lot of meetings with a lot of black women who were in charge of DEI, some of these corporations who then weren't there months later.

You'd send an email that said, does not work here anymore.

And then I had a deal go through.

And then the strike happened, the writers and the actors strike.

And although we won, I mean, both those unions, we won a lot of what we wanted.

What they did was, we're just going to stop employing you.

We're just going to stop.

So we're going to stop making content.

Famously, Warner Brothers, who owns CNN, where I used to work, stopped the post-production on the Batwoman movie in post-production.

So they were already $90 million in, and it was like a black Batwoman, which I don't know if that's why they stopped it, but didn't help it, I'm sure.

But they were just like, we'd rather use this as a tax write-off than release this as a film.

Even though the directors were in the edit bay, two Egyptian directors, I believe.

Again, who knows if this is all connected.

We're in the edit bay, editing, finishing the movie, and they're like, stop your work.

It's never coming out.

And so not only, so there came a point where like, there's people I know in Hollywood who haven't worked since the strikes.

And that's when I had this moment and I, a lot of projects I thought I was gonna do just sort of disappeared.