Below is a testimony to The Highline School Board, it is shown here as it was presented:
School Board Testimonial by Alex Myrick – March 1, 2023
Good evening, Directors and Dr. Duran,
When I had just graduated from college, I went to South Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer working with Tuberculosis and Leprosy patients. I stayed for four years and had many memorable experiences. What weighed on me the most, however, were the conditions in North Korea.
I have a few friends who are defectors from North Korea. Two of them are sisters, Esther and Grace Jo. Their father was killed by the regime, and I am honored to be called by them “uri migook abbuji,” which translates as “our American father.” During the famine of the 1990s, they had no rice or real food for over a year and survived by eating grass and tree bark. Their two younger brothers starved to death.
The question I pose to you this evening is: “How concerned should we be about any similarities between North Korea and the U.S.?” A fellow defector of Esther and Grace is Yeonmi Park. Her second book is being published this month. She escaped to China, where she was sold for $200 as a sex slave. She eventually crossed the Gobi desert to Mongolia and finally came to the U.S. She enrolled in and graduated from Columbia University.
She was shocked to see her fellow university students describe themselves as oppressed because people could not follow their newly invented pronouns. She had the eerie experience of being exposed to the academic preoccupation with white supremacy, victim mentality, and identity politics, realizing that the U.S. was closely following the direction of the North Korean regime she had fled. Incredibly, the proponents of Critical Race Theory, with the acquiescence of their local kindred spirits pushing IRI (Instruction on Race and Identity), noted that as an Asian, her skin tone was adjacent to that of white people and classified her as an oppressor. This is almost too perverse for a healthy mind to grasp: An actual 21st-century survivor of literal slavery is reclassified as an oppressor because her skin color is not dark enough. Please ask yourselves, how far down this path are you willing to be led?
Thank you.
