Black & Abroad turned a racist slur into travel ads

The phrase 'go back to Africa' is a long-used racist slur, deployed against Black people in the US and Europe to suggest they don't belong. A social-listening analysis conducted by Black & Abroad, a Black-travel company, found the phrase was being used online roughly 4,500 to 5,000 times a month, overwhelmingly in a negative, hateful context — reach that already existed, aimed at Black audiences, entirely outside any campaign Black & Abroad itself controlled.

The standard response to a slur aimed at your exact audience is to fight it directly, ignore it, or run a counter-messaging campaign that argues against the sentiment — none of which touches the slur's own existing distribution or reach. A conventional awareness or rebranding campaign would have had to build its own audience and reach from scratch, competing for attention against a hateful phrase that already had a large, recurring, targeted footprint online.

Scraped live posts using the slur, redacted the hateful text, and reused the bare phrase as headlines for travel ads, turning the insult's own reach into the campaign's.

The slur already had massive reach among the target audience, so using it inherited that reach.

Real-time tracking caught the phrase wherever it appeared, ensuring the ads appeared in the same context.

Redacting the hateful text kept the phrase recognizable, making the reframe instantly relevant.

The same words that delivered the insult now delivered the invitation, flipping the meaning.

When an attack already reaches your audience, redirect that channel instead of building a new one.

Black & Abroad and FCB/SIX reported that 89 percent of the campaign's target audience said it reduced the hate associated with the phrase, and 52 percent called it 'hopeful' or 'empowering,' while booking interest in the brand's Africa tours rose. congresswomen, which Black & Abroad's founders said validated the scale of hateful usage their own social-listening data had already found. congresswomen weeks after the campaign's launch, giving the campaign's own underlying usage data unexpected real-world validation.