*In a new cover story for Billboard, Dolly Parton says she supports the mass protests over racial injustice, and is calling out folks who are against the movement, yet call themselves Christian.
The 74-year-old country music icon said that while she hasn’t attended a protest herself, she understands “people having to make themselves known and felt and seen.”
“Of course Black lives matter,” Parton told Billboard. “Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No. Everybody matters.”
Parton said she believes that “we all have a right to be exactly who we are.”
“All these good Christian people that are supposed to be such good Christian people, the last thing we’re supposed to do is to judge one another,” she said. “God is the judge, not us. I just try to be myself. I try to let everybody else be themselves.”
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In 2018, Parton changed the name of her Tennessee and Missouri tourist attraction the Dixie Stampede because of “Dixie’s” connections to the Confederacy. The attraction, now called Dolly Parton’s Stampede, is a Civil War-themed dinner show centered around a “friendly North and South competition.”
“When they said ‘Dixie’ is an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t wanna offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede,'” Parton said of the name change. “And you just do stuff not realizing, but as soon as you realize that it is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass.”
