Internment. Incarceration. Not many people make a distinction between the two terms or understand why it’s so important to do so. But in a historic decision aimed at accuracy and reconciliation, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it would drop the use of “internment” in most cases to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
Instead, The Times will generally use “incarceration,” “imprisonment,” “detention” or their derivatives to describe this government action that shattered so many innocent lives.
The decision comes eight decades after The Times viciously campaigned to incarcerate Japanese Americans during the war, questioning their loyalty — an action disavowed six years ago with a formal editorial apology.
“We are taking this step as a news organization because we understand the power of language,” Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida said. “We believe it is vital to more accurately describe the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, and to do so in a way that does not diminish the actions our country took against its own citizens and the experience of those who were held captive.
“The Los Angeles Times itself supported the incarceration at the time, and this style change reflects our commitment as an institution to better represent the communities we serve. We hope this will help bring closure to the families of those unjustly incarcerated and deepen our society’s understanding of that period.”
Some Times journalists have long pressed for change in how to describe what has been commonly called internment — with the late Henry Fuhrmann, our former assistant managing editor and self-described word nerd, taking the lead.
“‘Internment’ is a euphemism that trivializes the government’s actions,” he argued in a 2020 Twitter thread. “Officials employed such benign-sounding language to obscure that the U.S. was incarcerating Americans whose only ‘crime’ was that they looked like the enemy.”
My family experienced the distinct difference between those two terms.