This is a good example of how states use law and rhetoric to manage religion, and how religious freedom can be more about appearances than practice

While reading this, I thought about how Western narratives today sometimes oversimplify or misrepresent Chinese government policies, especially around religion and ethnicity. For example, news coverage about Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang often portrays the situation as entirely one sided, which can lead to political pressure or sanctions, even though the reality is more complicated.

Mainstream privilege refers to the advantages or benefits that people get from belonging to the dominant culture, group, or social norm. It’s the “default” status that makes life easier because society is structured around those mainstream values, language, and practices of the majority.

Here, “apologetic tactic” means that Japanese American Buddhists were using the idea of religious freedom to defend or justify their religion to the American majority.

This shows how the government used schools to control Japanese kids and make them more “American.” It connects law, language, and politics, and helps explain how authorities tried to manage immigrant communities in the early 1900s.