When the reporter persisted, Decker explained that her father—a preacher born around 1933, according to the Courier Journal, or 68 years after slavery was outlawed—was “born into poverty” and worked for free with his family on the property they lived on. (It’s unclear whether the adults were paid, though the Courier Journal notes that it sounds more like “Decker’s father was forced by his parents to do chores” and that the family were tenant farmers.)

“My dad had to do chores when he was growing up 😭😭” - KY State Rep. Jennifer Decker

Admitting that you think poor people are slaves isn’t the flex you think it is you feckless bag of hair.

Yeah, because growing up poor and being a slave are the same. WTF is wrong with these people?

There’s wage slavery, there’s debtor’s prison, there’s sharecropping, and then there’s chattel slavery.

When ‘slavery’ is brought up in American politics we almost exclusively mean the latter.

Absolute clown 🤡

I’ve never heard a black person say “My father was a slave”, because it’s fucking 2024, what the hell?

It’s true that there were a significant number of white (European) indentured servants/slaves in the Americas during the first centuries of colonization:

From Barbados to Virginia, colonists long preferred English or Irish indentured servants as their main source of field labor; during most of the seventeenth century they showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from chattel slaves – a degradation that was being carried out in a more extreme and far more extensive way with respect to the peasantry in contemporary Russia. The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.

reference

Between 50 and 67 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies, from the 1630s and American Revolution, had traveled under indenture.

Wikipedia article

However, by the 1900s white slavery really only persisted in the form of sexual trafficking of women, which ultimately led to the passing of the Mann Act in 1910. It’s also likely that the idea of an organized slave trade at this time was hyperbolic:

While prostitution was widespread, contemporary studies by local vice commissions indicate that it was “overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes.”

To claim that her father was a “slave” in the 1930s is a serious misappropriation of the term.

🤡

Equating forced labor, prison labor, indentured servitude, and poverty to chattel slavery is ignorance at best and serves white supremacy by minimizing the the Atlantic Slave Trade. If you get confused, just ask: Is someone legally allowed to sell my child?

Karl Marx agrees.

What exactly is a dirt farm?

So what is the term of the child of an indentured servant?