Rep. Jennifer Decker (R) attempted to redefine the meaning of American chattel slavery while claiming that diversity and equity programs are unnecessary because her father was able to rise up from his alleged humble beginnings.
During a Q&A at Kentucky State Rep. Jennifer Decker (R) NAACP appearance, an audience member asked the lawmaker — who is white — if her family had any role in the slave trade.
“My father was born on a dirt farm in Lincoln County,” Decker, 68, replied, according to audio first obtained by the Courier Journal. “His mother was the illegitimate daughter of a very prominent person who then was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves.”
“So, if you’re asking, did we own slaves? My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white.”
“A white slave in the mid-20th century? Talk about recreating history!” University of Louisville Pan-African Studies Professor Dr. Ricky L. Jones wrote. “Maybe this makes sense in the alternate supremacist reality that is Kentucky, but nowhere else. Jennifer Decker and her Republican friends lie about and distort everything else, why not this?”
“I’m embarrassed for her & KY. She is an elected official. She should feel embarrassed,” poet and activist Hannah Drake tweeted. “During [Black History Month] she wants us to know her father was a slave. Help me somebody.”
Decker later told The Courier Journal that because her father was born impoverished and that his family worked as farm hands on someone else’s property that essentially put him on the same level as an enslaved person.
The Courier Journal adds that Decker’s father was a white preacher born in the 1930s, nearly 70 years after slavery was outlawed in America.
