A white Republican state lawmaker shockingly claimed that her 1930s-born father was a slave.
Kentucky State Representative Jennifer Decker made the statement to disparage diversity, equality, and inclusion programs.
The Courier Journal reported that Ms. Decker, 68, discussed her state education bill to restrict DEI programs at a 1 February NAACP meeting.
DEI training and scholarships would be cut by the measure.
Ms. Decker told the NAACP that DEI programs were unnecessary because her father was a slave who succeeded.
He was white, and my father was a slave to him, she claimed.
The Daily Beast said that she responded to a query concerning her family's slave trade involvement.
Ms. Decker said that her father was born on a dirt farm and that his mother was the illegitimate child of “of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves” approximately 70 years after slavery was abolished in the US.
Ms. Decker told the Courier Journal that her father was a slave since he was born poor and worked on someone else's estate.
The family worked there when my father was a youngster, she claimed.
Though her father did not suffer the same atrocities as enslaved Black people, she subsequently confessed that labeling him a slave was "probably" too much. Ms. Decker clarified that her family wasn't abducted and taken across the seas to work.
Social internet criticized Ms. Decker's assertions.
White slave in the mid-20th century? What a historical recreation! Dr. Ricky L. Jones, University of Louisville Pan-African Studies Professor, tweeted. “Maybe this makes sense in Kentucky's alternate supremacist reality, but not elsewhere. Why not lie about and misrepresent things like Jennifer Decker and her Republican friends?
Republicans say DEI policies unfairly benefit non-white, straight, immigrant, and differently abled persons. Ms. Decker's House Bill 9 calls secondary school "divided, more expensive, and less tolerant," Louisville Public Media says.