Dolly is not the blueprint because she was pure. Dolly is the blueprint because we got to watch a human being practice.
Yesterday, when I heard Dolly Parton died, I wanted to go home, pour something good, put on some music, and sing and sip.
Because this grief is layered.
There is the grief of losing Dolly.
There is the grief of losing someone who has seemingly always existed.
There is the confronting of your own mortality that happens when the people who formed the soundtrack of your life begin leaving it.
And then there is the grief for the people who introduced you to them.
The mothers and grandmothers.
The kitchen radios.
The records.
The long car rides.
The people whose voices you can still hear singing along even though they aren’t here anymore.
Dolly Parton died August 25, 2026, at 80 years old.
And as I watched people grieve her, I kept thinking of one word.
Elder.
Not celebrity.
Not icon.
Not even legend.
Elder.
And when I posted:
One Appalachian person responding to me called her a Sacred Mother.
A queer Appalachian wrote that Dolly made them proud to be Appalachian and that, for queer Appalachians especially, she sometimes stood in the place of family members who could not or would not offer acceptance.
Someone else said:
We lost a piece of home.
And another response stopped me completely:
Responsible ancestor.
Whew.
Because that is what I have been trying to teach.
So again, White people, if you have ever wanted to understand what we mean when we talk about an elder, Dolly Parton gave you a blueprint.
Not because she was perfect.
Not because she always had the correct politics.
Not because she memorized the right progressive vocabulary.
Not because she arrived on this earth in rural East Tennessee in 1946 with the political consciousness of an 80-year-old woman living in 2026.
She didn’t.
Thank God.
Because if Dolly had always been right, there would be nothing here for us to learn about praxis.
What made Dolly extraordinary was that over the course of a very long life, we got to watch what happened when her values encountered more information, more access, more power, more people, and more responsibility.
We got to watch her practice.
Messily.
Imperfectly.
Humanly.
And THAT is praxis.
Dolly Is Not the Lesson. Praxis Is.
I want to be very clear before we go any further.
This is not an argument for the sainthood of Dolly Parton.
I know some of y’all have already started. 😂
Dolly would NEVER.
Dolly loved everybody.
Dolly was pure.
Please stop.
Because the moment we require Dolly to be pure in order for her life to have value, we reproduce the exact supremacy culture I am trying to dismantle.
Good/bad.
Either/or.
Perfect/problematic.
Saved/canceled.
Saint/sinner.
That binary leaves no room for humanity.
And liberation requires us to become much more capable of holding complexity than that.
Dolly’s music made her famous.
Her life gives us a case study in praxis.
That distinction matters.
Praxis is not simply having values.
It is not reading the books.
It is not learning the terminology.
It is not voting correctly.
It is not putting your pronouns in your bio.
It is not knowing how to define intersectionality.
It is not attending the meeting, reposting the infographic, or learning how to say all the right things before everybody else.
Those things can be important.
God knows we are living through enough anti-intellectualism that I am NOT telling y’all to stop reading.
But intellectual understanding alone is not embodiment.
You can intellectually understand racism and still become defensive the second somebody tells you that you have caused racial harm.
You can understand patriarchy and still center men in every decision you make.
You can understand capitalism and still hoard every resource you acquire.
You can understand community and still abandon your people the moment you gain enough class access to get away from them.
You can know every word.
And still not have a praxis.
That is why the Liberation Method™ moves through:
Reclaim Memory → Develop Consciousness → Build Liberated Culture.
Because knowing is not enough.
Something has to happen between knowing and becoming.
And Dolly gives us a way to see it.
RECLAIM MEMORY
Who Were You Before You Were White?
Long before I was doing this work publicly, I was doing ancestral work.
I began as a pastoral counselor doing spiritual counseling, card readings, ancestral work, and helping people make meaning of what they carried.
Years ago, I went viral on TikTok because I said something that apparently people were not ready for:
White people need ancestral healing too.
Because whiteness takes from white-bodied people first.
Before whiteness can function as a system of domination, it has to convince people that white is enough of an identity.
Language gets lost.
Names change.
Accents disappear.
Foods become embarrassing.
Spiritual practices are abandoned.
Grandmother’s ways become superstition.
The village becomes backward.
The hometown becomes something you escaped.
And eventually someone asks:
Who are your people?
And the answer is:
I’m just white.
When I first moved away from New York City, that answer confused the hell out of me.
What do you mean you’re just white?
I grew up in the South Bronx.
My maternal grandparents were Irish, from County Sligo. They came to New York in the 1950s.
My paternal grandmother was Black, born in South Carolina, with roots in the Gullah Geechee coastal South.
I understood ethnicity before I understood the academic language for ethnicity.
My Blackness never prevented my Irish family from understanding me as Irish family.
Now, Ireland has since corrected me…
What I grew up in was very specifically Irish American culture.
Fair enough.
But I understood that people came from somewhere.
People had food.
Music.
Stories.
Ways of mourning.
Ways of worshiping.
Ways of arguing.
Ways of gathering.
Ways of surviving.
Then I met white Americans whose ancestry had been reduced to a checkbox.
White.
That is a loss.
And I need white people to understand that acknowledging this loss does NOT absolve whiteness of what it did to everybody else.
Ancestral reclamation is not a search for innocent white people.
It is not:
Actually, my ancestors were oppressed too, therefore racism doesn’t count.
My love…, NO.
It is asking harder questions.
What happened to your people?
What did your people participate in doing to other people?
What land made them?
What waters carried them?
What languages did they lose?
What did colonization do to them?
What did they later participate in colonizing?
What did whiteness offer them?
What did accepting whiteness require them to surrender?
What survived anyway?
What deserves reclamation?
What requires grief?
What requires accountability?
What requires repair?
THAT is ancestral work.
Otherwise you have simply replaced somebody else’s sage bundle with the historically appropriate European herb, bought a Celtic necklace, learned three goddesses and opened an Etsy shop.
Etsy decolonization.
No, beloved.
Go deeper.
And because Dolly would have paid me for this labor of love, you should too. 😂
But praxis also means that access should not belong only to those with disposable income.
If a paid subscription is not accessible to you right now, I offer no-questions-asked scholarships. Email Scholarships@DesireeBStephens.com and ask. That’s it.
We’re going deeper from here.
Into praxis. Into class. Into whiteness and inheritance. Into what we owe our people. Into repair, eldership, ancestral reclamation, and what it actually means to build liberated culture.
I hope you come along… by whatever means you have access to.
Because liberation that requires everyone to have the same resources to participate ain’t liberation.
