White Women Wake Up

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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 force states to redraw maps that diluted Black and brown voting power. Justice Elena Kagan called it the completed demolition of the Voting Rig...

Send us Fan Mail 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, Karen walks Jonelle through the eight principles Lewis used to sustain a lifetime of civil rights work, organized as four inner practic...

Send us Fan Mail 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 unpack the entitlement paradox, a 2019 study by Stamkou, Van Kleef, and Homan showing that entitled people enforce rules on others more...

Send us Fan Mail 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 a decade. Then she names the forces that buried it: Andrew Johnson's pardons, the reversal of 40 acres and a mule, the Dunning School...

Send us Fan Mail 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 survival strategy rooted in enslavement, not a cute HR term for adjusting your vibe), what masking actually means (a clinical term from the autist...

Send us Fan Mail 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 weight of indifference, starting with Eli Wiesel's warning that indifference reduces the other to an abstraction. Karen shares...

Send us Fan Mail 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 empowers individual white women but often stalls before reaching intersectional action, leaving women of color out of the equation....

Send us Fan Mail 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 World Syndrome, a media theory from the 1970s by researcher George Gerbner, confirmed by decades of follow-up studies. The finding: lo...

Send us Fan Mail 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, she felt nothing. But when commenters questioned her values and intentions, she spiraled into imposter syndrome. Jonelle and Karen unpack why...

Send us Fan Mail 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 aversion, and the science of neuroplasticity, Karen and Jonelle unpack the real reasons resistance to change is hardwired into us. The...

Send us Fan Mail 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 asks a harder question than most: what if that first story is still quietly running the show? They dig into anchor bias, the way our earlies...

Send us Fan Mail 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 the body to the cycle of rehearsed narratives that keep us stuck. They draw on both personal stories and research to show why silence is ne...

Send us Fan Mail 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 prioritize politeness, avoid conflict, and mask their true feelings, often at the expense of vulnerability and growth. Drawing from research on emotional...

Send us Fan Mail 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 grief, identity grief, guilt, and shame, clarifying how these responses can either open awareness or quietly reinforce avoidance. They explo...

Send us Fan Mail 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 enforced selectively, revealing how power shifts based on who is speaking. The conversation explores how white women may unknowingly rely on a...

Send us Fan Mail 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, internal bias, and selective emotional response, Karen and Jonelle unpack how proximity to whiteness shapes empathy and fear, even for those c...

Send us Fan Mail 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 violence, exclusion, and exploitation experienced by marginalized communities. Through examples ranging from wartime sexual violence by American so...