Second day of 10th grade, and the rhetoric of “internment”

[eve_prime]

D. came home in a better mood than yesterday. Several things about his day:

• He likes chemistry a lot more than biology (as I expected he would).
  
• He's eager to practice the saxophone now, motivated by being in the class with the more experienced players.
  
• He thinks he might like to become a physician!
  
• He has two Japanese-American teachers (in addition to the Japanese language teacher, who is a native of Japan).

We had an interesting discussion about something that happened in his Global Beliefs and Values class today. The teacher told the students about his life story, and I asked if he had had family in the internment camps. D. said yes, his parents and grandparents had been, and that they're now becoming referred to as concentration camps, since that's what they were. I noted that “internment” is something of a euphemism.

However, there was a girl in the class who really wanted to argue the point. She's travelled a lot, and seems to be the sort of white person who travels as a means of collecting metaphorical tokens of personal authority, rather than in order to open themselves up to the world. She was adamant that the Japanese-American camps could not be concentration camps because she'd been to Auschwitz and knew the difference. The teacher explained that although Auschwitz is often called a “concentration” camp, it was really a death camp, and that's the difference. But the girl wouldn't accept what the teacher had to say. I mentioned that questioning someone else's lived experience of oppression was pretty offensive. I hope he understood what I was saying – it wasn't just that the student was full of herself.