Imara Jones, the founder of TransLash media, has called out the BET Awards for refusing to air her ad about the need to protect the lives of Black trans women that was set to run during the three-hour program. “An ad I made about the need to protect the lives of Black trans women was set to run during the show,” Jones wrote in an op-ed for The Grio. “Yet by the end of the three-hour program, I sat in shock because my message had never crossed the screen.
Slowly I became enraged at the realization that all fingers for how this came to be pointed to BET, a network with a track record of transphobia.” “But this year’s BET Awards awards were supposed to be different,” Jones writes. “That’s because, with fist-pumping messages and emotional