Commentary: Manzanar is too stripped down to memorialize what we must remember: American xenophobia.

Late last month, I took a road trip from Los Angeles to Manzanar. The World War II-era concentration camp - which interned more than 10,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese between 1942 and 1945 - sits just 220 miles north of us, in a windswept section of the Owens River Valley. And yet in all the years that I have lived in Southern California, I had never visited it before.

I drove up on a Saturday: the 405 to the 5 to the 14 to 395. I passed