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.
White Women Wake Up
'Get Your Own Culture': The TikTok Question White Women Can't Answer
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
TikTok is full of a new directive aimed at white people: get your own culture, stop stealing ours. In this episode, Karen brings the question to the conversation, asking what it would actually look like for white women to find and embrace our own culture. Jonelle pushes back. She argues that asking white people to 'find our culture' misses the deeper truth Nell Irvin Painter, the Princeton historian who wrote The History of White People, identified more than a decade ago: whiteness is the default, and the dominant culture cannot be re-found because it never went anywhere. The conversation moves through the Americanization movements of the early 1900s and post-World War II era, the cornrows debate, the plus-size store backlash, and ends with Toni Morrison's 1993 question to Charlie Rose that neither host can fully answer: if I take race away from you, what do you have? They agree to disagree, on the air, in real time, which is what WWWU is for.
CALLS TO ACTION
- Sit with the Toni Morrison question for 24 hours: if I take race away from you, what do you have? Then write down what came up. Do not edit it. Notice what your first answer was before you tried to make it acceptable.
- When you catch yourself wanting to claim a piece of someone else's culture this week, pause and ask why the borrowed version felt better than your own life. The answer is usually the actual work.
- Stop using 'I don't have a culture' as a defense. The next time the phrase rises up, replace it with: 'My culture is the default in this room, and that is exactly the problem.'
We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com
Survey Link: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey
