The United States is in the throes of a movement against racism and police violence. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain and many other Black Americans has brought American human rights abuses to the fore once again, revitalizing picket lines in faraway places, from New York to London to even Seoul.

But as thousands of people around the world spoke up and marched against racism in the United States, words of solidarity rose out of one particularly strange place: North Korea, a country notorious for its own human rights atrocities.

“The tragic murder committed in Atlanta — at a time when anti-racist demonstrations triggered by the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis are sweeping across the country — is the revelation of reality in the U.S., where racial discrimination is rampant,” a June 25 statement from one of North Korea’s state-run newspapers, the Pyongyang Times, reads.

“Analysts claim that the clampdown on blacks by the white police under the pretext of law enforcement … are the epitome of deep-rooted social inequality in American society.”

In fact, North Korean state media published at least eight articles referencing demonstrations or police violence against Black Americans in June 2020 alone. One article mentioned how Black Americans have been disproportionately killed by the COVID-19 outbreak, while another directly references the #ICan’tBreathe and #NoJusticeNoPeace movements.

The statements, which appear to be in solidarity with civil rights movements, seem surprising when one factors in North Korea’s long-standing record of human rights abuses. But it’s no shock to analysts who have studied North Korean propaganda and the history of DPRK outreach.

“This is not new,” C. Harrison Kim, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told NK News. “North Korea has almost always supported radical movements led by people of color in the U.S. This has been going on for decades, from the postwar period to throughout the 1960s and beyond.”

FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

In September 1969, author and activist Eldridge Cleaver — head of international affairs at the Black Panther Party (BPP) at the time — stepped off the plane into Pyongyang and began his exploration of the DPRK and Juche ideology, per an invitation from the North Korean government.

His personal notes reveal moments of deep reflection on the Korean War and explicit solidarity with Pyongyang. At one point that month, Cleaver wrote, “The Korean people, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and their great leader, Comrade Kim Il Sung, has heightened our consciousness to a level that makes us equal to the task of dealing with our number one enemy, the U.S. imperialist aggressors.”

“How can the Korean people in the North coexist peacefully with U.S. imperialists in the South?” Cleaver jotted in another entry. “It is impossible … Oppressed people cannot coexist peacefully with their oppressor.”

By the time Cleaver finished his tour, the collaboration between Kim Il Sung’s regime and the Black Panther Party was cemented into history.

Cleaver penned introductory remarks to Kim Il Sung’s speeches and wrote about Juche principles in the BPP’s newspaper. Allies of the Panthers even formed a collective called “Juche” in Cambridge, Massachusetts and published under a newspaper of the same name. And in 1970, Cleaver’s daughter was born at a hospital in Pyongyang. The family gave her a partly-Korean name — Joju Younghi Cleaver.

“This solidarity is much weaker today than in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but North Korea’s alliance with the black power movement was a very real thing,” C. Harrison Kim said.

“I think it’s somewhat of a misrepresentation of North Korea as a country that’s only interested in rockets and propaganda,” Kim continued. “North Korea has always carried out some kind of international networking or solidarity as a part of its state operations.”

PROPAGANDA OR SOLIDARITY?

Analysts are split on what to make of North Korea’s June 2020 entries about “chronic and organized racism” in the U.S.

Some believe it’s mere propaganda designed to distract from North Korea’s human rights record and create a false equivalence with the United States. Yet others — like Kim — think there’s a more substantive allegiance at heart.

“Let us not imagine that North Korea believes that Black lives matter,” said Sandra Fahy, an associate professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University and author of two books on North Korean human rights. “The race card is played. And I do say played.”

From the archives: Ask a North Korean — What do North Koreans think about Black people?

“When North Korea talks about human rights, they immediately deflect. It’s a whole formula,” Fahy added. “They use whataboutism, they use ‘tu quoque,’ a Latin term that basically means, ‘You should talk — you’re a hypocrite.’ They are very unsophisticated and childlike logical fallacies.”

It’s true that North Korea has specifically used recent protests to fire back at the U.S.’s human rights record. A June 17 article from the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) called out American “double standards and intolerable mockery of international justice,” adding that the U.S. routinely “faults human rights performances of other countries.”

“Is it surprising to me that North Korea is covering these stories? No, because North Korea always likes to make the U.S. look bad,” Fahy said. “But the fact that they’re not naming Black American individuals aside from George Floyd or the police officers is interesting.”

Kim, on the other hand, sees it a little differently. He acknowledged that North Korea may sometimes use civil rights movements as propaganda, but said the historical alliance runs much deeper.

“North Korea is definitely supportive of radical movements that are criticizing the status quo of U.S. capitalism,” he said. “Is that wrong or right? It would depend on your political position.”

He pointed out North Korean military assistance in many parts of Africa, as well as engagement with Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Besides the Soviet Union, there was no state-socialist country more active than North Korea back then,” Kim said. “As a poor country, North Korea was showing support for other poor countries of the time … It has always supported other countries — non-white countries — in their fight against imperialism and domination by big, superpower European or white-majority countries.”

“There’s only a handful of North Korea experts that will side with me on this,” he added. “Some will know this history, but will interpret it as only propaganda. I don’t see it that way. It’s propaganda at times, of course, but they built schools, irrigation systems, hospitals, and they did this without the notion of profiteering.”

These examples are, no doubt, very different than North Korea’s recent remarks about the #ICan’tBreathe and #NoJusticeNoPeace movements. But Kim argues that the storyline is the same: North Korea speaking up for a group it sees as an anti-U.S., anti-establishment underdog, and in a way that conveniently omits the DPRK’s own record with human rights abuses.

Nevertheless, one can’t forget that North Korean state media has also defaulted to racial slurs to criticize former U.S. President Barack Obama, calling him a “wicked black monkey” just six years ago in 2014.

From the archives: Is North Korea a racist state?

“None of this means that North Koreans are okay with interracial or international marriage. These are different things, and there is a lot of nuance here,” Kim said. “North Korean nationalism and Korean nationalism, too, do have a very gendered and racist aspect to it.”

Regardless, Fahy says her past research suggests that many North Koreans do not easily “recognize structural inequality within a society,” and so any mention of a Black Lives Matter movement in domestic state media likely has a limited effect.

“Will North Koreans be able to transpose what they’re reading about inequality and murder in the U.S. with their own lived experience of inequality and murder by the state?” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

Edited by Oliver Hotham