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Dolly Parton, who is on the latest cover of Billboard magazine, took the opportunity to showcase her support for racial injustice protests and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The 74-year-old country music superstar said that while she hasn’t attended a protest, she understands “people having to make themselves known and felt and seen.”

“Of course Black lives matter,” Parton said in a Billboard interview. “Do we think our little white a**es are the only ones that matter? No. Everybody matters.”

She 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.”

This is not the first time Parton has taken a stance against racism. In recent years, she rebranded her dinner theater attractions “Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede” to remove the word “Dixie.”

“There’s such a thing as innocent ignorance, and so many of us are guilty of that,” Parton told Billboard, “As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumba**. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

 

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