This is fairly short. It's an analysis of why Dolly Parton could get away with being non-partisan and still take strong stands. The psychology is important. Dolly was brilliant.
--Kim
I think the people posting that Dolly Parton was political are missing the point. Yes, she did so much to advance the values of the left. But if I were on the right, I would could cite her open expressions of faith, her strong businesswoman identity, or her dedication to private philanthropy as evidence that she was politically on “my side”. The fact that everyone thinks she was secretly on their side (including me), is worth examining.
She herself kept saying, over and over again, that she was not political…. Even as she kept making statements about hot button political issues. So… Was she actually apolitical? Or was she just… Political-but-brilliant-and-kinda-sneaky?
Look at the actual statements she made.
When she changed the name of The Dixie Stampede to The Stampede, she did not make a typical lefty-sounding statement about fighting racism. She didn’t mention racism at all. She said “I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede.”
She framed the name change in values of hospitality, business sense, and kindness. Values that are accessible to the right. She did not refer to it as an antiracist action, although the pattern of “listen to the people who said the thing was painful, and take the action they asked for” is a pretty excellent blueprint for making headway or race issues. She also modelled what the left could call “centering the oppressed”, by focussing her statement on the experience of those who were hurt, stating “I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose”.
Most brilliant of all, she modelled a comfort with change… No handwringing and no discussions of white guilt or identity. She just said “As soon as you realize something is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass.”
When she took an action or made a statement about a “lefty” issue, did not use lefty language, because she was not talking to us. And I would argue she had a much stronger effect than the kind of echo chamber-ey statements I often find myself making.
Same thing with LGBTQ issues. She didn’t talk about homophobia or transphobia in the language of the left. She talked about how we shouldn’t judge, and that everybody should be able to be who they are and love who they love.
But the real magic for me was watching it cut the other way. When she was defending traditionally “right” issues.
Imagine being someone who feels like their right to be openly Christian is under attack. There’s Dolly, openly using words like “God” and “Pray”. But she doesn’t use any of the right wing language around it… She’s not raving about the war on Christmas or getting anti-secular. She’s not talking to them. She’s talking to me.
And it worked. I found myself thinking “Well, nobody has a problem with public Christianity in the way Dolly practiced it”… And then wondering if people on the right thought the same thing about the “lefty” issues. When she said “of course Black Lives Matter—do we think our little white selves are the only ones that matter?”, did people who were hostile to those words think “well, if THAT’S what it means…”v.
It was very hard to have a problem with any of her causes, the way she framed them.
She chose to side with compassion, and authenticity…. wherever she found it. Independent of politics. She wasn’t just “not picking a side”… She was brilliantly translating, in a way that kept the issues centred where they should be. Not on politics, but on responding to pain with compassion, and living honestly in the world while supporting others to do the same.
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