White Women Wake Up
White Woman Wake Up is a podcast where two white women from different generations come together to have honest, multi-generational conversations about how we, as white women, can awaken our own cultural biases and challenge the status quo. Through authentic, vulnerable dialogue—free from shame—we aim to empower ourselves and our listeners to unlearn harmful conditioning, build greater empathy, and embrace new ways of being in the world. We hope to inspire transformative growth by fostering curiosity, learning from one another, and embracing the complexities of our shared and individual experiences.
Episodes
74 episodes
Am I Being a Karen? The White Impulse to Police Strangers
Jonelle brings a confession to the table: she broke a traffic rule on the way to a doctor's appointment, another driver blocked her to punish her for it, and her first reaction was rage, not guilt. That gap is the whole episode. She and Karen u...
Why Don't We Learn About Reconstruction? White Women and the Lost Cause
Karen takes Jonelle through the Reconstruction era, the 12-year window after the Civil War when 2,000 Black Americans were elected to office, 400+ Black towns took root, and the Black-to-white wealth gap collapsed from 60:1 to 10:1 in just over...
Code-Switching and Masking: Why These Words Aren't Accessories
This week, Jonelle and Karen unpack what happens when white women borrow survival language that was never built for us. After reading The Hate U Give for Banned Book Club, the conversation digs into what code-switching actually means (a surviva...
Indifference Is Not Neutral: The Empathy Gap White Women Don't See
Indifference is not neutral. It is the quiet architecture of harm that operates beneath the surface of politeness, efficiency, and "just getting through the day." In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Jonelle and Karen unpack the crushing wei...
Is Micro Feminism Empowering White Women While Leaving Others Behind?
Micro feminism is the practice of small, intentional daily acts that challenge gender norms, like defaulting to "she" for unknown CEOs or crediting women whose ideas get taken in meetings. Karen and Jonelle unpack why this TikTok-viral trend em...
You Can't Trust Anyone: Mean World Syndrome and White Women's Fear
When Karen nearly canceled a family trip because weeks of news coverage had convinced her the airport would be chaos, dangerous, and hostile, she didn't know there was a name for what had happened to her brain. This episode introduces the Mean ...
Imposter Syndrome & White Allyship: When Self-Doubt Wins
Not all criticism lands the same way. In this episode, Jonelle brings a deeply personal and vulnerable topic to the table. After a TikTok video on white entitlement reached 15,000 views and was flooded with harsh comments attacking her body, sh...
Why Change Feels Hard (And Why That Is Exactly Why You Need It)
Change is not a character flaw. It is biology. In this episode, Karen brings a deeply personal topic to the table: why change feels so threatening, even when we know it is good for us. Drawing on research into the brain's threat response, loss ...
The First Story We Believe: Anchor Bias and the Judgments We Didn't Know We Made
Jonelle and Karen know we all carry a first story. The first thing we were told about a neighborhood. The first image we saw of a person. The first framing of a political movement or a community we had never actually encountered. This episode a...
Re-Release—S1:EP43-BRAVE Conversations: Finding Meaning in the Mess
Hard conversations shape us—yet too often we avoid them, shut them down, or mistake venting for dialogue. Karen and Jonelle take a closer look at what really happens when conflict rises at the dinner table or online, from visceral reactions in ...
Re-Release S1:E39 Breaking the Niceness Trap: Choosing Clarity over Comfort
In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle unpack the tension between cultural expectations of “niceness” and the need for authentic clarity. They reflect on how generations of white women have been socialized to priorit...
When White Grief Wakes Us Up and When It Shuts Us Down
This episode examines how white women experience grief when violence, injustice, or loss suddenly feels personal and why that grief often arrives late, conflicted, and emotionally charged. Karen and Jonelle unpack the difference between white g...
Unwritten Rules: When White Comfort Becomes Control
This episode examines how white entitlement often hides inside everyday expectations that feel neutral, polite, or “just the way things work.” Karen and Jonelle unpack a real-world incident at a shared resort pool where unwritten rules were enf...
When Empathy Isn’t Equal: White Grief, Fear, and the Limits of Awareness
This episode examines a difficult but revealing tension for white women on the path of awareness: why some forms of violence and injustice trigger deeper fear, grief, or urgency than others. Through an honest conversation about white grief, int...
Whose History Gets Protected and Whose Gets Erased
In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle examine how historical narratives are shaped by power, protection, and selective memory. They explore how whitewashed history sustains comfort for white Americans while erasing ...
The Watchful Dragon: When Defensiveness Blocks Growth
In this episode, Karen and Jonelle explore the idea of the “watchful dragon,” a concept borrowed from C.S. Lewis that describes the unconscious inner protector guarding our sense of safety and identity. This inner defense often activates when o...
Accountability Over Empathy: What the “Male Loneliness” Narrative Reveals About Emotional Labor
In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle unpack the growing conversation around the “male loneliness epidemic” and ask a harder question: who is being asked to carry the emotional labor of fixing it? Moving past media ...
Re-Release_S1:E10-From Awareness to Action: Challenging Our Own Narratives
In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle dive into the complexities of authentic allyship. They share personal stories of confronting privilege—one involving the pitfalls of colorblindness in a multicultural workplace ...
Re-Release_S1:E1- Starting the Journey: Learning, Growing, and Waking Up
This episode introduces a space for honest conversations about self-reflection, personal growth, and navigating privilege. We’ll unpack inherited biases, foster accountability, and explore ways to deepen understanding through open dialogue....
Who Controls the Story? White Women, Book Bans, and the Battle for Empathy
In this episode, Karen and Jonelle dig into the rising wave of book bans and why they matter for anyone committed to waking up. Using their own childhood favorites and foundational reads as starting points, they explore how stories expand empat...
The Ladder and the Hole: Giving, Systems, and the Stories We Never Tell
In this episode, Karen and Jonelle explore why stories of generosity often stop at the surface. Using examples from holiday giving, volunteer work, and media narratives, they examine how white culture celebrates the ladder that helps someone cl...
A New Season, A New Way to Wake Up
Season 2 opens with a new way to approach growth. Instead of rigid goals shaped by productivity culture, Karen and Jonelle introduce their Bingo Card Intention Framework, a playful system for staying engaged in long-term bias work without shame...
What We Learned This Year: Honest Reflection, Hard Lessons, and Waking Up Together
In this anniversary episode, Karen and Jonelle look back at one year of conversations, discomfort, learning, and unlearning. They revisit the heart of their work: examining how inherited biases shape everyday choices, relationships, and...
When Expectations Break Us — Acceptance, Grief, and Letting People Be Themselves
In this episode, Karen and Jonelle dig into the uncomfortable truth behind accepting people as they are. What starts as a conversation about expectations quickly becomes something more personal: why we struggle to accept the real people in our ...
Rewriting the Script: How Movies Shape What We Believe About Gender and Power
In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle explore how decades of movie tropes have quietly shaped our collective ideas about gender, race, and relationships. From Casablanca to The Goonies, they trace ...
