Reject inflammatory "concentration camp" rhetoric
A recent article on Poynter.org has ignited a debate about whether World War II Japanese-American detention centers should be called concentration camps.
Poynter ‘s Doris Truong writes, “For far too long, the WWII detention has been euphemistically
referred to as internment. With the 78th anniversary of Executive Order 9066 upon us, we as journalists must push for clearer language. Advocacy groups including Densho say what happened during the war equaled U.S.-run concentration camps. It’s notable that Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose order altered the lives of thousands of families, referred to the sites as concentration camps. Many Americans associate concentration camps only with Nazis, but any facility housing large numbers of a persecuted group meets the definition.”
No one would argue about the dictionary definition of concentration camps, but as journalists we must consider the connotations of terms, their baggage and accepted meanings, as we decide their appropriateness. Concentration camps, to most, mean not just detention, but places where people are tortured and systematically murdered. The reprehensible detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII does not rise to this level.
In fact, I would argue that calling these facilities concentration camps is needlessly inflammatory, leading to debates over semantics instead of more substantive discussions about what happened and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
This isn’t the first time the term concentration camps has been misapplied.
In an LA Times column June 9, 2019, Jonathan Katz wrote that Donald Trump’s immigrant detention centers should also be called concentration camps. Again, I consider such a label misleading and inflammatory. In my blog about Katz' column, I wrote, “Although the term concentration camp does technically describe Trump’s immigration detention facilities, the smoke created by the term obscures what’s going on inside these facilities. There is a technical distinction between concentration and death camps, but this distinction is pragmatically irrelevant—in the public’s view, they are one in the same.”
My suggestion—avoid any inflammatory, misleading hyperbole that uses the label concentration camp.
A recent article on Poynter.org has ignited a debate about whether World War II Japanese-American detention centers should be called concentration camps.
Poynter ‘s Doris Truong writes, “For far too long, the WWII detention has been euphemistically
No one would argue about the dictionary definition of concentration camps, but as journalists we must consider the connotations of terms, their baggage and accepted meanings, as we decide their appropriateness. Concentration camps, to most, mean not just detention, but places where people are tortured and systematically murdered. The reprehensible detention of Japanese-Americans during WWII does not rise to this level.
In fact, I would argue that calling these facilities concentration camps is needlessly inflammatory, leading to debates over semantics instead of more substantive discussions about what happened and how to prevent it from ever happening again.
This isn’t the first time the term concentration camps has been misapplied.
In an LA Times column June 9, 2019, Jonathan Katz wrote that Donald Trump’s immigrant detention centers should also be called concentration camps. Again, I consider such a label misleading and inflammatory. In my blog about Katz' column, I wrote, “Although the term concentration camp does technically describe Trump’s immigration detention facilities, the smoke created by the term obscures what’s going on inside these facilities. There is a technical distinction between concentration and death camps, but this distinction is pragmatically irrelevant—in the public’s view, they are one in the same.”
My suggestion—avoid any inflammatory, misleading hyperbole that uses the label concentration camp.
