“Drop the A-Word” is a social media campaign launched by a new Muslim-American group, and co-founded by metro Detroiters, that urges Arabs to stop using Arabic racial terms when referring to blacks.

The terms are Abed and Abeed. Abed is Arabic for slave or servant, and Abeed is the plural form of it.  The campaign calls on people to use the hashtag #DropTheAWord, allowing Twitter users to read responses. 

In Arabic, the words are not necessarily always used as slurs. Some Arabs have the name “Abed,” which means a person who is a servant of God. 

Arab Americans and civil rights activists say the words are used too frequently when referring to blacks in public, and particularly on social media. Earlier this year, Muslim Americans formed the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative to deal with similar issues concerning race. 

Awareness on the derogatory terms was first triggered in an op-ed first published in The Arab American News months ago, titled “Fellow humans are not abeed,” written by Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations of Michigan. The editorial has gone viral on social media since then. 

Many Arabs who use the term don’t actually know it means “slave,” or that it is offensive, and they think it is the only word there is to use when referring to blacks. Activists say that while they understand many people using the terms don’t know their real meaning, they are mostly concerned with the context in which the terms are being used.