No More Euphemisms for Racial Cleansing: Our Duty Is to Name It and Talk About It

White America has a history of using euphemisms as code for things that make us emotionally uncomfortable , but not uncomfortable enough to take action.  We call certain neighborhoods “sketchy” without talking about how our redlining practices segregated them and keep their residents in a cycle of poverty.  White liberals often say they are “colorblind,” and while that  sounds sincere, it actually erases the reality of racialized treatment and maintains the status quo by refusing to see inequity.  Those with racial privilege living under this authoritarian regime can easily fall into naming the harm done by our American Gestapo as merely “immigration enforcement” when actually it is an attempt at racial cleansing.

If the actions in Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other cities across the nation were just about unlawful immigration, we wouldn't be seeing US citizens and green-card holders taken, birthright citizenship challenged, and so many atrocities against all people of color, regardless of citizenship or lawful residency. Under the guise of enforcing immigration laws, federal agents have committed homicides, kidnappings, maimings, thefts, civil rights violations, and a host of other crimes. Euphemistic phrases such as “enhanced enforcement,” “security operations,” or “public safety” mask these abuses and make it easier for elected officials to justify them or dismiss them as “training issues.”

Sadly, America has a long history of deliberately racializing groups of people based on skin color or ethnicity or country of origin and then removing or excluding them from the territories where they reside, most visibly Indigenous peoples and Black Americans. Native nations were pushed off ancestral lands through warfare, treaties made under duress, broken agreements, and settlement policies that transferred their land to white settlers and confined them to shrinking territories. The 1830 Indian Removal Act authorized the forced removal of tens of thousands of Native people from the Southeast to “Indian Territory,” producing the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” and other death marches in which many thousands died or were killed. “Sundown towns” emerged across much of the United States—places that expelled Black people each night or barred them from living there by threats, racist ordinances, and violence.  In her pivotal Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson notes that Nazi officials in the 1930s closely examined American Jim Crow laws and other race statutes as a model system when they drafted the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of rights and banned “mixed” marriages. But even these officials balked at the extreme US standard of the one-drop rule and declined to copy it.  Take that in.  The German Nazis thought our American White Supremacist System was too extreme.

Rarely do we talk about America’s white supremacist history in “polite company” or name  the ways  it continues today, let alone work in allyship with those who have felt state violence for generations.  Under our current fascist government, it is getting harder and harder for white Americans NOT to talk about these blatant atrocities, but  we must unmask not only America’s secret police but also our own vocabulary, engineered to keep the powerful comfortable.  When we name this oppression as racial cleansing, people might better see the moral stakes for what they truly are and resist the normalization of these brutal acts. Naming alone does not stop federal raids, murders, kidnappings, or deportations, but it does shape public consciousness.  We must continue to support local immigrant justice organizations, show up to court or community defense, and contact our representatives repeatedly.  And it is imperative that we share accurate information, change our everyday language, challenge euphemisms in conversations, and center the experiences of those most harmed.