In Brazil, 56% of the population is black. However, this majority has not seen itself represented in the country's power structures.

Our Congress is composed of 82.2% white people, and our main newspapers have only 16% black columnists. This structural racism muffles black voices and causes cultural erasure.

Raça Magazine, the pioneering and largest producer of content related to black culture in Latin America, was launched 25 years ago to construct conversations that only now the mainstream media begins to address.

Raça has always been ahead of its time by celebrating black empowerment and this should be reflected in its 25th anniversary campaign.

With a limited budget, we used the production resources of the magazine itself to paste 2,500 posters on walls of the three major Brazilian cities, run ads in the 25 largest magazines in the country, digital pieces, and send 25 customized flags for black influencers.

To celebrate 25 years of black culture in its pages, Raça Magazine drew inspiration from Afrofuturism, an artistic, cultural, and political movement that envisions a future of black empowerment, and created The Future is Black campaign.

Raça found references in the colors, symbols, and wisdom of the African past for a design system that pays homage to its origins and projects the next 25 years, with black people as protagonists of their own history in various areas of knowledge.

The campaign aimed to connect primarily with the black population, inviting them to celebrate their past and project a better future. On the other hand, it also sought to impact white people in different segments of society, transforming them into allies for the end of cultural erasure of the black community.

We looked to the roots of Afrofuturism for the wisdom and ancestral knowledge of Africa to develop the Art Direction of the campaign:

To choose the colors, we used the Pan-African flag, an icon of liberation for the African people.

In the iconography, we brought the Adinkra symbols, an ancestral technology system, Ananse ntontan, an ideogram of wisdom and creativity, and Sankofa, the bird that symbolizes the return to the past to give meaning to the present and build the future. For the typography, we were inspired by the first edition of "Kindred," one of the pillars of Afrofuturism, written by Octavia Butler.

Finally, in photography, we value Africanness through lighting, makeup, and costumes, highlighting black skin and bringing the characters into positions of protagonism.

The campaign posters were distributed on walls near high traffic areas in three major Brazilian cities and were also made available through a filter on Revista Raça's social media, generating earned media and a 1,300% increase in brand and campaign-related mentions.

The manifesto, published as an ad in the 25 largest publications in the country, generated PR and comments on the brand's channels, with 98% positive sentiment. Growing in relevance with a younger audience was a secondary goal of the campaign, but by bringing Afrofuturism as inspiration through a contemporary language, Raça Magazine increased its audience of 18 to 25-year-olds by 23% on its social media channels during the activation period.

Although Black personalities are prominent in all fields, the repertoire of most people in Brazil is composed of white individuals, since they have always been the protagonists in the construction of the Brazilian imaginary. The Black majority of the population is portrayed in a secondary, marginalized, and stereotyped way.

Created in 1996, Raça Magazine was the first publication to feature black people as protagonists, addressing topics of interest to the black community, something that other publications would only do decades later.