Jennifer Decker’s controversial statement on her white father stirs debate and criticism over DEI programs.

Jennifer Decker, a Republican state representative from Kentucky, made a startling and highly controversial claim during a February 1st NAACP meeting, stating that her white father, born in the 1930s, was a slave. The comment, which was made in the context of discussing her sponsorship of a bill to defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, quickly sparked widespread backlash.

Decker, 68, was addressing a question about her family’s involvement in the slave trade when she insisted that DEI programs were unnecessary. She argued that her father, who grew up in poverty, had experienced a form of enslavement because he worked on land that was not his. “My father was a slave, just to a white man, and he was white,” Decker claimed, sparking confusion and anger among those in attendance.

The bill Decker is sponsoring seeks to cut funding for DEI-related training and scholarships in the state. In her speech, she recounted her father’s upbringing, saying that he was born on a dirt farm and that his mother was the illegitimate child of a prominent person who “was kind enough to allow them to work for him as slaves.”

Despite the fact that slavery was abolished decades before Decker’s father was born, she insisted that his upbringing in poverty mirrored the hardships faced by enslaved people. However, she later backtracked, admitting that her comparison was “probably” an exaggeration, acknowledging that her father did not suffer the same abuses or the same violent conditions experienced by enslaved Black people. She also clarified that her family had not been forcibly taken from their homeland and sold into servitude.

The remark has been widely mocked and criticised on social media. Dr Ricky L. Jones, a professor at the University of Louisville, responded on Twitter, saying, “A white slave in the mid-20th century? Talk about recreating history!” He further criticised the claim as a distortion of facts, calling it a reflection of an “alternate supremacist reality.”

The controversy surrounding Decker’s statement comes as Republicans continue to oppose DEI initiatives, arguing that they provide unfair advantages to non-white, non-straight, immigrant, and differently-abled individuals. Decker’s bill, known as House Bill 9, claims that DEI initiatives make higher education more divisive, expensive, and less tolerant.

The backlash against her comments has reignited debates over the role and impact of DEI programs in education and public policy.