
Is Dolly Parton teaching children about “white privilege” by giving them free books for decades?
Dolly Parton: The Legend
Dolly Parton is a leading contender for “most beloved American icon” and has been so for most of her life. Parton famously hails from impoverished circumstances in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, which she has immortalized in songs like “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad),” and began performing as a musician in church by the age of six.
After graduating high school, Parton moved to the country music hub of Nashville, where she began a career writing songs for other performers and eventually became known for her powerful voice, comedic presence, and blonde bouffant hairstyle on the popular music program The Porter Wagoner Show.
Since then, she has scored literally dozens of hits in country and pop music, starred in movies like 9 to 5 (1980) and Steel Magnolias (1989), and released innumerable albums.
She will next release Dolly Parton & Family: Smoky Mountain DNA – Family, Faith & Fables, a new album focused on her family history. It will be released on November 15 alongside a four-part documentary series of the same name.
Related: Dolly Parton Exiles Royal Family, American Treasure Rejects Kate Middleton’s Prestigious Offer
Dolly Parton is also known for Dollywood, her massively popular theme park in Tennessee. While Dollywood might be (slightly) less well known than Disneyland or Six Flags, it has been voted as one of the world’s best vacation destinations numerous times.
Just recently, Tripadvisor awarded Dollywood the number one slot in the 2024 Travelers’ Choice Best of the Best Awards and it ranks #10 (and the sole North American park) on the well-regarded Travelers’ Choice Top 25 Worldwide Amusement Parks list.
The Imagination Library
As though her ever-expanding theme parks were not enough, Dolly Parton is also well known for her philanthropic spirit. The singer is particularly known for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, an organization that has provided reading material to millions of children for years. The Imagination Library has been awarded the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, the Best Practices award from the Library of Congress Literacy Awards, and recognition in Reading Psychology.

It describes itself as:
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is a book gifting program that mails free, high-quality books to children from birth to age five, no matter their family’s income.
After launching in 1995, the program grew quickly. First books were only distributed to children living in Sevier County, Tennessee where Dolly grew up. It became such a success that in 2000 a national replication effort was underway. By 2003, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had mailed one million books. It would prove to be the first of many millions of books sent to children around the world.
Dolly’s home state of Tennessee pledged to pursue statewide coverage in 2004 and global expansion was on the horizon. After the United States, the program launched in Canada in 2006 followed by the United Kingdom in 2007, Australiain 2013 and the Republic of Ireland in 2019.
Among all of her endeavors, the Imagination Library might be the most beloved, which makes it all the more bewildering that it is the subject of research claiming that Dolly Parton and her organization are actively reinforcing notions of white privilege, heteronormativity, and the erasure of “dis/abilities, non-normative gender identities, or non-normative family structures.”
Speech-language pathologist Jennifer Stone has published a dissertation through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School titled “Reading Power With and Through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library: A Critical Content Analysis,” which uses critical race theory to assert that Dolly Parton and her philanthropy should not be providing free picture (and other) books to children, essentially because they reinforce existing social structures.
The dissertation abstract admits that “Policymakers share DPIL’s intention to leverage the power of picturebooks to transform family literacy practices. Families who own picturebooks read aloud early and often, and daily read-aloud habits have positive impacts on measures of children’s language and pre-literacy skills.”
But goes on to claim that:
“Unfortunately, picturebooks consistently misrepresent both reading and culture, which means the content of DPIL books could undermine DPIL’s purpose and perpetuate negative stereotypes while potentially inculcating community-wide biases regarding both literacy and cultural identities during a vulnerable life stage for two generations. The critical content analysis of the DPIL 2022 kindergarten corpus reported in this dissertation revealed explicit and implicit representations of literacy, race, class, gender, and dis/ability.”
Stone further asserts that the Imagination Library books represent primarily “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 subjugate children and to privilege a White, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative, able-bodied American norm.”
Related: Dolly Parton Releases Rapid Statement Amid Dollywood’s Battle With The Walt Disney Company
She further goes on to state, “I now understand literacies as multiple and dynamic and literacy intervention as potentially dangerous and informed by White saviorism.”
Dolly Parton is not above criticism. Very recently, her refusal to outright condemn LGBTQIA+ individuals as immoral and against Christian principles was condemned in a Federalist op-ed that stated, “She’s right that all should be treated with love and kindness, but when we refuse to label sin a sin, we’re doing more harm than good. The gospel of Dolly Parton is popular with the masses, but don’t bank your eternity on it.”
But now it appears that Parton is coming under fire for both being too liberal and non-judgemental in her work and also being too conservative and promoting patriarchal notions of white privilege. It really seems like, for all the good she does, Dolly Parton can’t get a break.
Do you think the Imagination Library reinforces white privilege? Opinions below!