UNC Gives Award To Dissertation Criticizing Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library For “White Saviorism” & Not Featuring Homosexual Families In Children’s Books

Coming at Dolly Parton ? That's a bold move. At a time when nobody can agree on...well, anything, Dolly may be the one person left in the world who is universally loved. And a large part of that is probably because she's chosen to remain out of politics and instead focus on music and just being a good person. One of Dolly's major initiatives over the years has been her Imagination Library. Founded in 1995, the program sends a free book each month to children from birth to age 5. They sent out their 200 millionth book in 2023, and as of 2022 the Imagination Library was sending out over 2 million books every month to children not only in the United States, but also in Canada, the UK, Australia and Ireland. Sounds like a great program, right? That's because it IS a great program, focused on helping increase child literacy and encouraging children to read from a young age. Who could have a problem with that? Well meet Jennifer Stone, a speech and language pathologist and recent doctoral student seeking her Doctorate of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For her dissertation , the PhD student decided to examine Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, and found the program to be "potentially dangerous." Dangerous? How could it possibly be dangerous, you're probably asking yourself. Well according to Stone, the books chosen by the Imagination Library to be sent out to children feature racially diverse characters, but she found that the majority were "created by invisible White authors and illustrators who offer little cultural specificity." She also found troubling the lack of representation for characters with disabilities: "Characters with normative, able bodies dominate, and the few who experience any weakness are abandoned or repaired quickly and easily." And unfortunately (according to Stone), the books portrayed characters as heterosexual: "Unfortunately, all other cultural characteristics analyzed (i.e., gender, class, and dis/ability) were found to be portrayed in manners consistent with previous findings. In other words, the corpus featured characters portrayed as cis-gendered, heteronormative, middle-class, 113 and able-bodied." The horror... Of course, some of the books we're talking about here include Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and even Dolly's own Coat of Many Colors. But I guess these books are dangerous because Peter Rabbit wasn't a homosexual? Anyway, UNC thought so much of Stone's dissertation that the university awarded her dissertation the James J. Gallagher Dissertation Award from the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. And in a release announcing the award, Stone says she even met with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library to share her findings: “Children who have two mommies or two daddies are political in the United States. I think that the Dollywood leaders were surprised to learn that there were no characters with disabilities in the books, but I don't think they were surprised by the heteronormativity. They see excluding diverse family structures as a way to remain apolitical and keep the focus on reading.” Keeping the focus on reading? Can't have that these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tscb01jfukc