If American soldier Travis King really did defect to North Korea to escape racism, as Pyongyang claims, he may be disappointed to find he’s sought refuge in what is arguably one of the most racist countries in the world.

DPRK state media reported on Wednesday that King fled to North Korea because of “inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination” and “the unequal American society,” but the soldier now finds himself in a country that treats interracial marriage like a form of pollution and even carries out forced abortions on ethnically-mixed babies.

Pyongyang delights in capitalizing on the U.S.’s own centuries-long struggle with racism, denouncing its arch-nemesis as a “kingdom of racial discrimination.”

Yet despite professing sympathy for the African American experience when it suits its political needs, North Korea has also used race to shut people down, famously deriding U.S. President Barack Obama as a “wicked black monkey” in 2014.

“He acts just like a monkey with a red bum irrationally eating everything — not only from the floor but also from trees here and there … Africa’s national zoo will be the perfect place for Obama to live with licking bread crumbs thrown by visitors,” according to one vox pop interviewee state media felt obliged to report.

King might enjoy a relative degree of privilege should Pyongyang choose to use him as a propaganda tool, but even then, the experience of other foreigners in the DPRK shows that he’ll face a life of extreme segregation.

RODONG RACISM

North Korea particularly despises Americans, American multiculturalism and its effect on South Korean society.

As the ruling party daily the Rodong Sinmun once put it, the “theory of ‘multiracial society’” is “an unpardonable bid to negate the homogeneity of the nation, make south Korea multiracial and Americanize it.”

“The south Korean pro-American traitorous forces advocating the theory of ‘multiracial society’ are riffraffs who have not an iota of national soul, to say nothing of the elementary understanding of the view on the nation and social and historic development,” it continued.

A North Korean official, reportedly dismayed that South Korea was allowing farmers to marry Mongolians, Vietnamese and Filipinos because the rural population was declining, even rebuked a southern counterpart to his face at a meeting during a period of inter-Korean détente in 2006.

The South Korean assured him that these marriages were “but a drop of ink in the Han River.” Nevertheless, the North Korean protested, “not even one drop of ink must be allowed to fall into the Han River.” 

While one might dismiss this as one man’s opinion, the remark aligns with reams of North Korean propaganda that hold up a xenophobic ideology of ethnic nationalism, suggesting that the official was regurgitating the views that the state had taught him to believe.

HAN CHINESE B******

The DPRK will go to such lengths to ensure the racial purity of the North Korean people that it even forces abortions on women pregnant with babies of mixed ethnicities, according to defectors.

Often seeking work or food, thousands of North Korean women have crossed the border into China over the years — sometimes tricked by brokers and trafficked or sold into marriages with Chinese men.

A number of female defectors have testified that the DPRK state subjects women to forced abortions when they’re repatriated from China, which views them not as refugees but as illegal economic migrants.

One defector from North Pyongan Province told the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) that a police holding camp guard dragged her to a hospital to get an abortion when she was three and a half months pregnant in Jan. 2006.

“I resisted having the abortion because it was my first child, but they beat me up saying that the child was a Han Chinese b******,” she said. “I didn’t get any injections during the surgery, but luckily enough, the blood stopped after a week. I had to work like other people even less than one week after my abortion.”

Lee, from North Hwanghae Province, told NKDB that she knew someone who was forced to have an abortion seven months into her pregnancy “because her child was Chinese.”

“They tied her up to the gynecological chair and performed the forced abortion on her,” Kim, from South Hamgyong Province, said about a woman who was four months pregnant. “The children conceived by women who went to China are not accepted as human beings.”

According to the NKDB 2020 white paper, there were 395 cases of forced abortion in the organization’s Unified Human Rights Database as of July 2020.

It added that “forced abortion has not been frequently enforced on women who become pregnant in North Korea” and that most cases “affect those women who became pregnant in China before they were forcefully repatriated.”

HAVING SAID THAT…

But while the DPRK state’s ideology is intolerant of any violation of the population’s supposed racial purity, that doesn’t mean North Koreans can’t get along with other races and ethnicities. 

North Korean leader and Chicago Bulls megafan Kim Jong Un famously formed a close friendship with Dennis Rodman, the former NBA superstar and an African American.

Rodman visited the DPRK four times between 2013 and 2017, and Kim even hosted “The Worm” at his luxury Wonsan compound.

North Korea also welcomed American-born Ricardo Ratcliffe, a Black naturalized South Korean basketball player, to Pyongyang for an inter-Korean friendship game in 2018.

The Rodong Sinmun described the occasion as “north-south basketball games for reunification,” and state TV didn’t try to hide the fact that Ratcliffe was on the court. During the game, the DPRK cheer captain even started chanting Ratcliffe’s Korean name, “Ra Gun-ah! Ra Gun-ah!”

It’s even possible to be Black and a DPRK citizen.

James Joseph Dresnok, the U.S. soldier who defected in 1962 and passed away in 2016, is survived by three sons: He had two children with a Romanian woman, and one son with a half-North Korean and half African woman.

This all suggests that if King does successfully claim asylum in North Korea, as DPRK state media says he wants to, he could manage to integrate in his own way.

Just like the other American soldiers that defected before him, he’d probably be segregated from the rest of society and have to live under intense surveillance. But as a propaganda piece, he’d also likely be treated reasonably well compared to the average citizen, so that the DPRK could wheel him out to criticize the U.S. about racism when they need to.

In some respects then, despite being an incredibly alienating and lonely experience, being Black in North Korea might actually be better than being North Korean in North Korea.

But the privilege of a better standard of living than ordinary North Koreans — who suffer from chronic food shortages and are denied all of the same basic freedoms that Americans enjoy as a birthright — isn’t anything to shout about.

Black, white or Asian: At the end of the day, everyone is a second-class citizen in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea.

Edited by Alannah Hill