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Some Thoughts About The Phrase "Concentration Camp"

By Eric Muller

Jennifer at Mixed Race America relates another episode in the seemingly endless debate over the use of the term "concentration camps" to describe what the U.S. government termed Japanese American "Relocation Centers" in World War II. This is not a new debate. Indeed, it began while the camps were still open. Remember that in Korematsu v. United States, decided in 1944, Justice Roberts called them "concentration camps," a phrase for which Justice Black took him to task. At the level of ordinary usage, Justice Roberts had the better of the argument; it was Justice Black who was getting an early start on revisionism. In ordinary conversation, everyone from FDR down to the detainees in the camps called them "concentration camps" back then. Here, for example is an excerpt from an article from the NY Times in January 1943 about plans to recruit soldiers out of the camps: But it's not enough for us today simply to point out that people in 1942 or 1943 called them "concentration camps"; we are using the words in 2008, and the phrase took on a different meaning when the horrors of the Nazi genocide became linked it. To the average American today, "concentration camp" principally means "confinement site for genocide." The camps for Japanese Americans were not confinement sites for genocide. I guess I can see why, in the eyes of a person like "Older American Historian" (referred to in the post at Mixed Race America), the term "concentration camp" might seem like a suspect effort to depict the camps as places even worse than they were. But that's not why scholars use the term "concentration camp." We use it chiefly for a different, and far better grounded, rhetorical reason: to defeat euphemism. The government clothed each step of the process of evicting and detaining Japanese Americans in sweet-sounding words of assistance: exile was "evacuation"; detention and scattering were "relocation." The camps were "relocation centers" in government parlance. These were all Orwell-speak. And everyone knew it; hence the ubiquitous "concentration camp" in day-to-day conversation. We have another purpose in using the term "concentration camp" -- to remind readers and listeners (or to bring to their attention, if they'd never thought about it before) of what the American and the Nazi camps actually had in common: the forced warehousing of a racially defined enemy of the state. Justice Frank Murphy saw this common thread in 1943, when he wrote (in Hirabayashi v. United States) of the "melancholy resemblance" that the U.S. program against Japanese Americans bore to the treatment of Jews in Europe. So there are definitely rhetorical reasons for using the term "concentration camp," but "Older American Historian" apparently mistook them for an effort to capture genocidal meaning from the Nazi Holocaust. The points are principally to deny a legacy of American euphemism, and secondarily to emphasize the racial scapegoating that characterized the confinement. None of this means that "concentration camp" is a term to be thrown about loosely. In my view, the term has become so laden with the connotation of genocide that scholars should not use it in speaking of or writing about the Japanese American experience without briefly explaining that the term is historically accurate, necessary to defeat euphemism, and not a claim of identity with the Nazis' camps in Europe. But properly explained, "concentration camp" strikes me as an accurate -- indeed, a necessary -- term for the Japanese American "relocation centers" of World War II.

Full post as published by Is That Legal on April 13, 2008 (boomark / email).