Dolly Parton’s Free Book Programme Is Raising “White Privilege” Backlash

The Legend of Dolly Parton

For the most of her life, Dolly Parton has been a strong candidate for the title of “most beloved American icon.” Famously, Parton is from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, where she was raised in poverty. Her upbringing has been immortalised in songs such as “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad).” At the age of six, she started playing music in churches.

Following her high school graduation, Parton relocated to Nashville, the epicentre of country music. There, she started composing songs for other artists and soon rose to fame on The Porter Wagoner Show thanks to her strong voice, engaging demeanour, and blonde bouffant hairstyle.

Since then, she’s recorded countless albums, starred in films including Steel Magnolias (1989) and 9 to 5 (1980), and scored literally hundreds of songs in the country and pop music genres.

 

Her upcoming album, Dolly Parton & Family: Smoky Mountain DNA – Family, Faith & Fables, is centred around her family history and will be released in early 2019. It will be available on November 15 along with a named four-part documentary series.

 

Another well-known asset of Dolly Parton is her enormously successful theme park in Tennessee, Dollywood. Despite being (somewhat) less well-known than Six Flags or Disneyland, Dollywood has been consistently ranked as one of the top travel destinations worldwide.
Dollywood was just named the top park in the 2024 Travellers’ Choice Best of the Best Awards by Tripadvisor. It also comes in at number 10 (as the only park in North America) on the highly acclaimed Travelers’ Choice Top 25 Worldwide Amusement Parks list.

 

The Library of Imagination

As if having theme parks that never stop growing wasn’t enough, Dolly Parton is also well-known for her generosity. The singer is best known for founding Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, an institution that has long given millions of kids access to literature. The Library of Congress Literacy Awards Best Practices award, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and Reading Psychology distinction have all been given to the Imagination Library.

 

It calls itself: No matter the financial situation of the child’s family, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a book gifting programme that sends free, excellent books to children from birth to age five.

Following its 1995 debut, the programme saw rapid growth. The first books were limited to youngsters residing in Dolly’s home county of Sevier County, Tennessee. It grew so successful that a nationwide replication attempt was started in 2000. One million books had been mailed by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library by 2003. It turned out to be the first of many millions of books that kids would get worldwide.

In 2004, Tennessee, Dolly’s home state, promised to explore statewide coverage, and international growth was imminent. The initiative began in Canada in 2006, then spread to the United States, the United Kingdom in 2007, Australia in 2013, and the Republic of Ireland in 2019.

The Imagination Library is perhaps the most well-liked of Dolly Parton’s projects, so it is even more puzzling that studies alleging that the institution actively promotes heteronormativity, white privilege, and the erasure of “dis/abilities, non-normative gender identities, or non-normative family structures” are focused on it.

Jennifer Stone is a speech-language pathologist. She published her dissertation, “Reading Power With and Through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library: A Critical Content Analysis,” through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School. Using critical race theory, Stone argues that children shouldn’t receive free picture books and other books from Dolly Parton and her philanthropy because these books essentially reinforce social structures already in place.

 

“Policymakers share DPIL’s intention to leverage the power of picturebooks to transform family literacy practices,” the dissertation abstract acknowledges. Early and frequent read-alouds from families with picture books have a positive effect on measurements of children’s language and preliteracy skills.

“Unfortunately, picture books frequently misrepresent reading and culture. As a result, the content of DPIL books has the potential to undermine the organization’s goals, reinforce unfavourable stereotypes, and instill prejudices about literacy and cultural identities in the community at a vulnerable age for two generations. The DPIL 2022 kindergarten corpus’s critical content analysis, which is the subject of this research, made explicit and implicit representations of gender, race, class, literacy, and disability.

Stone goes on to say that the books in the Imagination Library are essentially about “Three inductively derived themes: reading to succeed, living the American dream, and perfecting parenting revealed complex intersections of discourses of power that resulted in oppressive childism, which operated to privilege a White, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative, able-bodied American norm and subjugate children.”

 

She continues, saying, “I now understand literacy intervention as potentially dangerous and informed by White saviorism, and literacies as multiple and dynamic.”

 

Dolly Parton is not impervious to critique. Her failure to categorically denounce LGBTQIA+ people as immoral and contrary to Christian teachings was recently criticised in a Federalist opinion piece that said, “She’s right that everyone deserves love and kindness, but when we refuse to label sin as sin, we’re doing more harm than good.” Although many people believe in Dolly Parton’s gospel, you shouldn’t stake your entire life on it.

However, it now seems like Parton is facing criticism for her work, which is both too conservative and promotes patriarchal ideas of white privilege, as well as too liberal and judgmental. Despite all of her good deeds, it appears that Dolly Parton is always in need of a break.