White Women Wake Up

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of White Women Wake Up , Karen and Jonelle go deep on the colonial mindset—not just as history, but as a living framework that still shapes white imagination, entitlement, and fear. Inspired by the books Decolonizing Therapy by Dr. Jennifer Mullan and Louder Than the Lies by Ellie Yang Camp, Karen shares how unlearning colonization has cracked open her own views on...

Send us Fan Mail Karen brings the topic. At an event she watched a speaker take a run of critical questions, and instead of the room escalating, it got calmer. A friend who saw it called it humility, and Karen realized she didn't know what the word meant. She traces humble, humility and humiliate to one Latin root, humilis, low to the ground: humility is a lowness you choose, humiliation is a...

Send us Fan Mail Jonelle brings the topic after hearing her friend Dr. Liina-Ly Roos speak about her book The Not-Quite Child. Sweden's 1928 welfare promise was that there would be no unwanted children, and the ideal Swedish child was Pippi Longstocking: strong, independent, talking back to what was wrong. Karen read Pippi as a kid who needed to calm down; Jonelle says that is an American rea...

Send us Fan Mail What does it mean to move through the world in a body that’s always political? In this episode, Karen and Jonelle unpack a powerful statement from a Black speaker—“My body is always political”—and explore the privilege of not having to think about how our bodies are judged, policed, or made into symbols. From airport observations to experiences shaped by body size, sexual orientat...

Send us Fan Mail White saviorism is helping someone and then treating the help as the finish line. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle start with a feel-good story and the one sentence at the end that changed it for Karen. A recent Indiana University grad met Sampson James, a former IU football player living on the street, and raised about $20,000 to get him an apartment. The...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Jonelle and Karen use three named patterns, NIMBY (Not in my backyard), social distance and moral licensing, to look at where good values stop. Jonelle cooks breakfast every week for young people living on the street. This summer a church next door, with Black Lives Matter and get ICE out signs in front, invited the breakfast into its kitche...

Send us Fan Mail Jonelle brings the anger she has been carrying since the outcry over Lindsay Clancy, and the double standard underneath it: six men killed their families in the United States during the weeks of that trial, and none of them stayed in the news. She runs the numbers on what the patriarchy costs women, from 84.2 percent of pregnancy-related deaths being preventable to marital rape no...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of White Women Wake Up, hosts Jonelle and Karen explore the complexities surrounding a policy requiring teachers to inform parents if students disclose their gender identity or pronouns at school. This mandate, embedded in a California mental health bill, has sparked debate over balancing student privacy with parental rights. The discussion highlights the unique ch...

Send us Fan Mail Karen opens with a photograph. Two women, fists raised, 1971, one of the most reproduced images of the feminist movement. Everyone can name Gloria Steinem. Almost nobody can name Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black organizer standing beside her. Gloria Steinem died on September 3, 2026, and in the wave of tributes, that image ran everywhere with one name attached to it. Karen traces...

Send us Fan Mail Karen brings the topic cold: why do we avoid the conversations we most need to have, especially when a life is on the line? She finished Crank by Ellen Hopkins and spent the whole book furious at the mother who watches her daughter unravel and never says a word, until she recognized herself in her. Karen opens up about her own teenage and college years of drug use, drinking, and a...

Send us Fan Mail Jonelle brings Karen two murder cases that stood before judges in the same August week, and one question underneath both of them: who gets believed. Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse, is on trial for the deaths of her three children, with postpartum psychosis as her defense. Keshia Golden, eight months pregnant at the time, was charged with first-degree murd...

Send us Fan Mail Karen brings a question she cannot stop turning over: when someone asks us to be more civil, what are they actually asking for? She traces the word back to its Latin root, civilis, and lays out the two dimensions researchers separate it into, politeness on one side and public-mindedness on the other. Most of us only ever use the first one. Karen then makes an argument that reframe...

Send us Fan Mail In this re-release episode of White Women Wake Up , Karen and Jonelle dig into what it really means to let people be—without needing them to think, act, or believe like us. Karen shares how a moment at church triggered deep discomfort around conversion culture and her own lifelong urge to “help” others align with her values. Together, the two explore how white women are often taug...

Send us Fan Mail Roughly 66,000 people are in ICE detention tonight, and about seven in ten have no criminal conviction at all. In this episode, Jonelle traces how that became both legal and profitable, all the way back to a single sentence in the 13th Amendment: the exception clause that abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime." From convict leasing in 1868 Georgia, to the r...

Send us Fan Mail Peacemaking is a skill you train, not a mood you hope to be in. Karen brings a confession: a moment when she spoke unkindly about someone and then asked to re-enter the room and try again, and turns it into a bigger idea: nonviolence and accountability are practiced, not performed. She and Jonelle trace how Rosa Parks trained under Septima Clark at Highlander before the boycott, w...

Send us Fan Mail Propaganda is a manufactured narrative repeated until it feels like common sense. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Jonelle unpacks the American propaganda that quietly taught us who to fear, who to pity, and who to never think about at all. From the welfare queen Ronald Reagan popularized in 1976, to the super predator panic of the 1990s, to the crack baby myth that never h...

Send us Fan Mail 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 in the physical feeling of mourning a loved one, then carry that same guttural feeling into how we hold race. Together they draw a hard lin...

Send us Fan Mail 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, Jonelle brings the statistics she could not shake after a Fourth of July and a World Cup steeped in national pride: the U.S. is one of onl...

Send us Fan Mail 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 expectations, and why this demand for assimilation can be harmful rather than supportive. Drawing from teaching, personal experience, and lived realities,...

Send us Fan Mail 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? This episode unpacks the superiority complex, Alfred Adler's idea that looking down on others is a cover for our own felt inferiority,...

Send us Fan Mail 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 American corporations. Jonelle, who held executive roles for years, resists the word at first, then walks straight into agreeing with it. To...

Send us Fan Mail 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 set of social norms we were built inside, while heritage is the specific, nameable story of where your family came from. Confusing the two is...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Pai...

Send us Fan Mail 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 year of the DEI rollback, including a McKinsey and Lean In Women in the Workplace finding that C-suite representation for women dropped from...

Send us Fan Mail 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 turned a political uprising into a sentimental holiday. From there the conversation moves into Barbara Welter's Cult of True Wo...