The Telegraph did a little stir the pot story on an academic article accusing Dolly Parton of all the phobias because of her project to send books to children who need them.

Dolly Parton has been accused of “white saviourism” for giving millions of free books to poor children.

The reading scheme, called Imagination Library, was launched by the country and western star in the US more than three decades ago. It now operates in the UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia, and has been lauded for helping to drive up literacy rates.

It gives disadvantaged pupils the same access to books as their middle-class peers by sending high-quality titles directly to the homes of under-fives.

That’s already a very over-simplified claim. No it doesn’t. That would be pretty much impossible for a small operation of this kind. It gives disadvantaged kids books that they wouldn’t have without this project, but that’s not the same access as middle-class peers, which is open-ended.

But according to a recently published academic paper, the award-winning scheme is racist by reinforcing notions of “white privilege and heteronormativity” and not representing enough cultural diversity, disability, trans and bisexual gender identities and non-traditional family structures.

The academic paper, by speech and language pathologist Jennifer Stone, published by the University of North Carolina, asserts that Dolly Parton’s philanthropy is “potentially dangerous” and smacks of “white savourism”.

Through its focus on “reading to succeed” and “perfecting parenting”, Parton’s Imagination Library scheme is “oppressive”, says Stone. Such themes subjugate children and “privilege a White, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative, able-bodied norm,” it adds.

That all sounds very annoying, but is the Telegraph painting an accurate picture? Following that description it gives us a list of people expressing outrage, but it’s a little too obvious that the Telegraph prodded the list of people to go “Outrage!!!” at this thing the Telegraph was showing them. It’s a good deal too formulaic, so I sought more information. A child development institute at the University of North Carolina wrote a piece on Stone’s paper a few weeks ago. I daresay someone showed the piece to someone at the Telegraph and here we are. Let’s see what it says.

For her doctoral dissertation, “Reading Power With and Through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library: A Critical Content Analysis,” Jennifer Stone, MS, CCC-SLP, examined the 60 books provided by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (DPIL) to the children who entered kindergarten in 2022. Established in 1995, DPIL is a book gifting program that mails free books to children in participating areas from birth until age five.

Millions of children nationwide received the books. Today the program is publicly funded for all children in 21 states. Given the wide reach of the program—which is expected to continue expanding—Stone undertook this research because of her desire to understand how the discourses of race, gender, class, ability, and literacy are represented in books that are distributed to an entire community.

Let’s be real: that’s not an absurd thing to do. There’s always discussion and controversy about what books children are reading and what’s being taught in schools.

She discovered that DPIL—which she says is evidence-oriented and interested in best practices—chooses books that do a good job of including frequent representations of racial diversity, with inclusive pictures and illustrations. However, there is less authentic representation of authors and illustrators, with mostly white illustrators and authors creating stories about children of color. All the books perpetuate gender norms and heteronormative relationships. Similarly, the distributed books lack diverse family structure relationships and focus on the middle class. Additionally, characters’ families in books rarely engage in the family reading practice the books are intended to promote.

This spring, Stone shared her findings with the leadership at the Dollywood Foundation, which runs the library. She noted that the books often conflate race and gender; the five families in the books who do not live in single-family homes are all families of color. Some of their apartments are depicted as places from which children needed to or wanted to escape. The books do not represent diversity of ability, since all the characters are portrayed as fit and able. Stone says that while her research was well received, she does not know if it will impact the book selection process.

That’s nowhere near as fatuous as what the Telegraph described.