When faced with low ratings and a sudden cancellation of The Nightly Show, host Larry Wilmore blamed racism. It was announced Monday that the Comedy Central show will end this week after a year and a half of production.

"I'm really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity," Wilmore said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "But I'm also saddened and surprised we won't be covering this crazy election or 'The Unblackening' as we've coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn't counted on 'The Unblackening' happening to my time slot as well."

In an interview with Mashable earlier this year, Wilmore explained "The Unblackening" as "the 'de-Negrofying' of the White House."

When you have somebody like a Donald Trump. He made no bones about trying to disprove Barack Obama's Americanism in trying to make him out to be some foreigner that was born in Kenya — I thought that to be very racist. I don't think that was masked at all, and I feel like there has been an element ... of some ugly racial things. Not everyone is like that of course, and I think most people aren't. But there is a streak of that on that side, and it's not good. So that, to me, is part of my comic take. When people say "Let's take our country back," my way of saying that is, "Yes, you want to unblacken the White House."

During Monday's episode, Wilmore mentioned racism directly. "My only regret is we won't be around to cover this truly insane election season. Though, on the plus side, our show going off the air has to mean one thing: Racism is solved. We did it," he said.

"Unfortunately, it hasn't connected with our audience in ways that we need it to," Comedy Central president Kent Alterman told The Hollywood Reporter, "both in the linear channel and in terms of multi-platform outlets and with shareable content and on social platforms as well."

The show has failed to be a viral hit, like other competing late-night shows The Late Show and The Tonight Show, as well as HBO's Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS, which connect well with urban viewers.

Even those who lamented the cancellation and backed Wilmore up on his race crusade admitted the show had low ratings. It got only a 0.2 rating with the 18-49 crowd and had just half the viewers of Comedy Central gems like The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, which it replaced. Ratings on IMDb and TV.com were also low, at 5.6 and 6.3 stars out of 10.

The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore
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">The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore
Get More: The Nightly Show Full Episodes,The Nightly Show on Facebook,The Nightly Show Video Archive