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
85 episodes
White Grief vs. White Guilt: Why Mourning Whiteness Opens Empathy
White guilt keeps us defensive and stuck. White grief, the practice of actually mourning what whiteness has cost all of us, is what moves us toward empathy. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen brings the topic and asks Jonelle to sit ...
The Greatest Country Myth: Why U.S. Paid Leave Ranks Last
The United States calls itself the greatest country in the world, yet it is the only wealthy nation with no national paid maternity leave and the only country in the World Cup without socialized medicine. In this episode of White Women Wake Up,...
Re-Release—S1:E40 Unmasking Ableism: Rethinking Neurodiversity and Inclusion
In this re-release episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle turn their attention to ableism and its everyday impact. They explore how neurodivergent people are often pressured to mask in order to fit into neurotypical expectat...
The Superiority Complex: Why We Tear Each Other Down to Feel Okay
When Karen walked into a plumbing shop, a loud stranger she had already judged turned out to be genuinely kind, leaving her with a question she could not shake: why do we so often feel we have to put someone down to feel okay about ourselves? T...
Corporate America Has a Caste System: Inside the Shadow Workforce
Corporate America runs on a caste system, and most of us were taught not to see it. Karen brings a question sparked by a LinkedIn essay from a South Asian woman who fled the caste system in India, then in Britain, only to feel it again inside A...
We Agreed to Disagree About White Culture. Here's the Fourth Way
Last week, Jonelle and Karen ended in a stalemate over whether white people have a culture. This week, they finish the conversation and land somewhere hopeful. The breakthrough is a distinction: white culture is the dominant, often invisible se...
'Get Your Own Culture': The TikTok Question White Women Can't Answer
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 o...
DEI Rollback: White Women Gained 142K Jobs. Black Women Lost 319K.
When DEI programs were rolled back in 2025, white women were quietly the biggest losers of leadership ground we had spent a decade gaining. But Black women lost almost everything. In this episode, Jonelle pulls the receipts on the first full ye...
Mother's Day Was a Protest Before Hallmark Bought It (And Trad Wives Prove It)
Karen brings the topic this week: Mother's Day. She shares the original Mother's Day Proclamation, written by Julia Ward Howe in 1870 as an anti-war appeal to mothers to refuse to send their sons to be killed, and walks through how Hallmark tur...
Callais, the SAVE Act, and the 69 Million Women Who Might Not Get to Vote
Jonelle brings the topic this week, the day after the Supreme Court issued Louisiana v. Callais. On April 29, 2026, in a 6-3 ruling, the Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the part that for sixty years let civil rights groups forc...
Why White Women Burn Out on Anti-Racism Work, and John Lewis's Answer
Karen brings the topic this week, and it cuts close to home for almost every white woman doing this work: I am tired, my Instagram only has 97 followers, and I am not sure any of this matters. Inspired by John Lewis's book Across That Bridge, K...
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...
