When you live in a country where neo-Nazis are considered “very fine people,” there’s a risk that milder forms of racial bias will get swept under the rugs or pale so much in the face of violent racism that it gets ignored. But here at Above the Law, we are here for the small beans, casual racial insensitivity as much as anything else.
So, yeah, let’s talk about how the New York State Bar Association lists Africa as a country. When you sign up for an account at NYSBA, they ask for your home address, and in the country field — nestled alphabetically between Afghanistan and Aland Islands — is Africa, which is decidedly not a country.
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This isn’t the first time lawyers have made this faux pas, so it is worth noting that Africa is a continent that actually consists of 54 separate and distinct countries. Conflating the one billion people who live on the continent with a single entity is a disturbingly prevalent Western tradition, so the NYSBA is far from alone in making the error, but it is important to call it out. There’s no option to select “North America” as a country on the drop down menu, despite there being fewer countries and people on that particular land mass. It’s not hard to provide people the dignity of accurately naming their homeland, so we should all get out of the business of treating Africa as a country.
EARLIER: https://abovethelaw.com/2013/02/dla-piper-literally-doesnt-know-what-country-some-of-their-offices-are-in/
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).