Republican lawmaker claims her white father was a slave

A white Republican state representative made the shocking claim that her father — a white man born in the 1930's — was a slave.

Kentucky State Representative Jennifer Decker made the comment while trying to dismiss the intention behind diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Ms Decker, 68, spoke at a 1 February NAACP meeting discussing a state education bill she is sponsoring that would ban DEI initiatives, according to The Courier Journal.

The bill would defund any training or scholarships associated with DEI initiatives.

While speaking at the NAACP event, Ms Decker claimed DEI initiatives were unnecessary because her father was a slave, but worked his way to success.

“My father was a slave, just to a white man and he was white,” she said.

Her comment was a response to an individual asking her a question about her family's role in the slave trade, according to The Daily Beast.

Despite being born nearly 70 years after slavery was abolished in the US, Ms Decker insisted 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.”

Ms Decker later told the Courier Journal that her father was essentially the same as a slave because he was born poor and worked on someone else's land.

“[My father] was a child and his family all worked there," she said.

She later admitted that calling her father a slave was "probably" too much, noting that her father did not experience the same abuses that enslaved Black people endured. Ms Decker also admitted that her family hadn't been kidnapped from their homes and shipped across the ocean to do their work.

Ms Decker's claims were widely mocked on social media.

“A white slave in the mid-20th century? Talk about recreating history!” University of Louisville Pan-African Studies Professor Dr Ricky L Jones said on X/Twitter. “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?”

Republicans have railed against DEI initiatives, claiming they offer unfair advantages to people who are not white or straight, who are immigrants, or who are differently abled. The language of Ms Decker's House Bill 9 claims the initiatives make secondary education "divided, more expensive, and less tolerant, " Louisville Public Media reports.