A Republican lawmaker from Kentucky said her white father, born in the 1930’s, was a slave.
Kentucky state Rep. Jennifer Decker (R) made the comment while speaking at a meeting held by the Shelbyville chapter of the NAACP to discuss a state education bill she’s sponsoring that would ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) programs, according to The Courier Journal.
Decker’s bill would defund training and scholarships dedicated to diversity.
At the meeting, Decker claimed DEI initiatives were not necessary because her father was a slave but managed to work his way up.
“My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white,” Decker said when someone in the crowd asked about her family’s role in the slave trade, The Daily Beast reports.
Decker said her father was born on a dirt farm in 1933—nearly 70 years after slavery was abolished—to the illegitimate daughter “of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves.”
Decker suggested to the Courier Journal that her father was basically a slave because he was born poor and his family worked on another person’s land.
“He was a child and his family all worked there,” she said of her father, implying that he had to do chores.
Decker later admitted that she “probably overstated” by calling her father a “slave”, noting that he did not experience the same abuses that enslaved Black people had. She also admitted that her family hadn’t been kidnapped from their homes, loaded onto ships and sent to work.