Thus, it’s not that surprising to see American politicians and pundits grasp at small semantic differences in terminology that describes forced extrajudicial detainment of a rhetorically demonized racial minority in harsh, punitive conditions. Whatever students are or are not taught about Germany’s and Austria’s concentration camps in their history classes, they very likely hear far less about the Japanese Americans who were rounded up and held in internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the millions of Native Americans killed by Europeans who decided that America belonged to them. If Americans confirm with one voice that, yes, there are concentration camps at the U.S.-Mexico border, we confirm the continuation of an ugly history we have yet to fully acknowledge — and the reality that it’s not behind us.

Unlike Germany, which after the end of World War II recognized the importance of confronting the atrocities that unfolded within its borders and making amends, the United States has yet to intentionally reckon with, much less make amends for, its own campaigns of dehumanization.

The national belief in exceptionalism and the corporate media’s thirst for access, scoops and clicks has given our border zone concentration camps that most American of things: A rebrand. We are, after all, the country where “Kentucky Fried Chicken” became “KFC” to make us forget our fried chicken is fried, where “torture” was given the friendlier gloss of “enhanced interrogation,” and where we are trying to make something called “freedom gas” (i.e., natural gas) a thing. Of course we’ll call child internment camps anything but concentration camps.