Why would it be better? Internment was a reactionary policy! GGP is raising an objection over labels that are accurate.

> Internment was a reactionary policy!

The definition of reactionary is "opposing political or social liberalization or reform".

Whereas internment was a reaction, indeed an overreaction, to the war with Japan, based on the bigoted fear that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan rather than to America. Not exactly the same.

Yes, if you are exclusively pedantic, then it is not an exact fit in the meaning. I would argue that the common use of the word reactionary = person who reacts to something inappropriately.

But getting lost in pedantry instead of just moving through common usage when in regular human discourse is useless. There is no reason to walk down that road, other than to obfuscate any point the other person is trying to make behind a smoke screen of pseudo-intellectualism.

Sort of like I tried to do with those last two sentences.

This is a pretty pedantic debate but my reason for using it was that I think a factor in this wasn’t just generic anti-Asian sentiment but also the idea that they were new and challenging the image of the United States as a white country. California politics had a nasty “yellow horde” streak which feels distinct from, say, bigotry directed against native Americans or, in the south, Mexicans which tended to recognize their historical presence, treating them as kind of hapless children needing white guidance rather than invaders.