White Women Wake Up

Jonelle + Karen
  • 5.0 (8)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. 22h ago

    Self-Silencing: Why We Avoid Hard Conversations

    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 mother who never asked, and then about the two conversations she skipped with Jonelle: the self-harm she knew about in high school and said nothing about for years, and the letter she mailed after college instead of asking a question. Jonelle tells her what that letter actually did, and reveals that the cutting was never depression; it was autistic masking and a need to feel something. From there, the two of them take avoidance apart. Karen cites therapist Annie Wright on avoidance as a nervous system response rewarded by the body, and Audre Lorde's line that your silence will not protect you. Jonelle pushes back with a harder question: before you ask why you are avoiding a conversation, ask whether the conversation is yours to have at all, and if it is not, ask what in you is bothered by it. Karen lands on an epiphany midway through: that we may stay silent because we believe naming a behavior means permitting it. They close on what actually works: open-ended questions that invite self-reflection instead of advice that triggers defensiveness, and specific questions instead of a generic "how are you doing" that is too big to answer. CALLS TO ACTION Name one conversation you have been avoiding this week, and write down the actual fear underneath it. Not the reason you tell other people. The real one. Karen's turned out to be that all three of her reasons for staying quiet were protecting her, not Jonelle.Before you decide to speak up, run Jonelle's decision tree. Ask whether this is yours to say, and if the answer is no, sit with what in you is bothered by it. Sometimes the work is the conversation. Sometimes the work is the discomfort you are trying to hand to someone else.Swap one piece of advice for one open-ended question this week with someone you are worried about. Make it specific, not "how are you doing." Then notice whether they open up or shut down.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: The line, "your silence will not protect you," is from Audre Lorde's 1977 essay, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. The idea that niceness and love are not the same thing comes from bell hooks' All About Love. The nervous system research on why avoidance feels safer and why it gets rewarded as a woman as diplomacy is from therapist Annie Wright, LMFT. Support the show

    Self-Silencing: Why We Avoid Hard Conversations

  2. Aug 28

    The Race Sympathy Gap: Why Lindsay Clancy Went Viral and Keshia Golden Didn't

    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 murder after stabbing a boyfriend; police had been called on more than fifty times. Jonelle refuses to put the crimes on a scale and says so on air. What she compares instead is the response. One case drew roughly 160,000 TikToks and close to two million GoFundMe dollars. The other drew six small Chicago organizations and a five-thousand-dollar bond. The conversation moves through the maternal mental health screening gap, the finding that Black women are 41 percent less likely to start treatment for a postpartum condition, the 2017 Georgetown Law research showing adults see Black girls as needing less protection starting at age five, and the uncomfortable detail that both lead prosecutors are women. Karen argues the cases are too complex to compare and that mainstream media is the culprit. Jonelle disagrees on the second point, and that disagreement becomes the spine of the episode. She closes by admitting her own feed skipped Keshia Golden entirely until two creators redirected her, and by naming attention as the one variable a listener actually controls. CALLS TO ACTION This week, when a woman's story is moving fast through your feed, stop and ask who is not in the frame. Then spend thirty seconds looking her up. That search is the whole ask.Pick one organization carrying a case nobody is covering and follow it. Survived and Punished and Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration are two places to start. Following is not activism, but it does change what your algorithm hands you next.Notice where your own empathy runs out this week. Not to judge yourself for it, just to see it. Then ask what would have to be true about a woman for you to give her the benefit of the doubt automatically.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: The postpartum screening numbers, that 1 in 5 women are likely to suffer from postpartum, and the finding that Black women are 41% less likely to seek treatment come from the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health and from research by Katy Backes Kozhimannil. The postpartum psychosis clinical picture is from Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman at Case Western Reserve and Dr. Veerle Bergink at Mount Sinai, reported by NPR and WBUR this month. The research on adults seeing Black girls as needing less protection in Girlhood Interrupted by Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia Gonzalez at Georgetown Law. The numbers on the incarcerated survivors are from the Sentencing Project and from Survived and Punished, co-founded by Mariame Kaba and Alisa Bierria. Keshia Golden's case was carried on for 4 years by Truthout, Block Club Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times, and by Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration. Support the show

    The Race Sympathy Gap: Why Lindsay Clancy Went Viral and Keshia Golden Didn't

  3. Aug 21

    Tone Policing and the Civility Industrial Complex: Who Does 'Be Nice' Protect?

    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 reframes the whole conversation: the Three-Fifths Compromise was civility in action, a polite agreement between northern and southern delegates that resolved white discomfort by deciding a Black person counted as three-fifths of a human being. Jonelle stops everything to sit with that. From there the two of them work through the civility industrial complex, the boom in campus dialogue programs and the private money behind them, and ask whether those courses teach productive disagreement or quietly train students not to protest. Jonelle brings the Carnegie Mellon Fence, a century-old free speech tradition the university painted over this summer. Karen introduces Black feminist scholar Loretta Ross and the five C's, calling out, canceling, calling in, calling on, and calling it off, and Jonelle names the pattern out loud: Karen is someone who has always wanted peace at any price. They land somewhere more useful than a rule. The question is not whether you were polite. It is what your compromise cost someone else. CALLS TO ACTION This week, catch one moment when you want someone to say it more nicely. Before you say anything, name what you were feeling in the two seconds before. Then decide whether your request is about their tone or about your comfort.Pick one conversation you have been avoiding because it might get tense, and try Loretta Ross's calling in. Name the harm plainly, then stay in the room with love and respect instead of blame. One conversation is enough.Practice calling it off. The next time you need to pause something hard, say out loud that you do not have the bandwidth right now, and name when you will come back to it. Then actually come back to it.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: Our historical anchor on the Three-Fifths Compromise came from Britannica and the League of Women Voters. Our live 2026 example came from Ryan Quinn's reporting in Inside Higher Ed, published this week. The two dimensions of civility are based on research published by the National Institutes of Health. The Five Cs and calling-in framework come from Loretta Ross, Black feminist scholar and MacArthur Genius Fellow. The tone-policing history is from Dr. Zuleyka Zevallos, and adrienne maree brown's We Will Not Cancel Us shaped our accountability lens. Support the show

    Tone Policing and the Civility Industrial Complex: Who Does 'Be Nice' Protect?

  4. Aug 14

    Re-Release—S1:E49 The Hard Work of Letting People Be

    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 taught to equate goodness with agreement and acceptance with control. They look at why authenticity requires boundaries, why curiosity can feel risky, and how moral certainty can quietly turn into moral policing. In a culture that rewards comfort and conformity, this conversation invites listeners to practice a slower, more courageous kind of connection—one rooted in respect, not rescue.  Calls to Action Ask yourself: When do I try to align others with my values instead of learning from theirs?Practice acceptance without agreement—curiosity over conversion.Notice when “being right” starts to feel safer than being real.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com  Support the show

    Re-Release—S1:E49 The Hard Work of Letting People Be

  5. Aug 7

    Slavery Has a Loophole: The 13th Amendment, Prisons, and ICE Quotas

    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 roughly $11 billion a year in prison labor produced at pennies an hour, to private prison companies posting record profits from ICE detention, Jonelle and Karen follow one pattern across 160 years. Slavery did not simply become prison. Each system of racial control keeps dying and returning in a new legal costume, always justified in race-neutral language, always landing on the same communities. Calls to Action This week, look up whether your own state still keeps the 13th Amendment exception clause in its constitution. Roughly 15 states still do, and most people have never checked.Learn your rights before you need them. If you see an ICE detention in your community, film from a safe distance, stay calm, and save a local rapid-response number, like United We Dream's MigraWatch hotline, in your phone now.Watch the documentary 13th this week, then send this episode to one person and ask them what they were actually taught about how slavery ended.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: The ICE detention figures are from TRAC at Syracuse University, and the analyst Austin Kocher, current as of summer 2026. The prison labor data is from the ACLU and the University of Chicago Global Human Rights Clinic's "Captive Labor" report. The history we walked through comes from Talitha LeFlouria's "Chained in Silence," Sarah Haley's "No Mercy Here," and Elizabeth Hinton's "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime." The abolition thinking is Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And the complication is James Forman Jr.'s "Locking Up Our Own.” Support the show

    Slavery Has a Loophole: The 13th Amendment, Prisons, and ICE Quotas

  6. Jul 31

    Rosa Parks Trained for That Bus: Why Peace Is a Practice, Not a Mood

    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, why role-play changes behavior when intentions don't, and how Mia Mingus' four parts of accountability make a real apology repeatable. They sit with appropriation and attribution, and land on the WAIT practice: why am I talking? Calls to Action Try Karen's re-entering-the-room practice this week. If a conversation leaves you uneasy about who you were in it, go back and ask someone to let you try again out loud. Repair is a skill, and it gets stronger with reps.Adopt the WAIT check from the White Woman Whisperer: before you speak in a hard moment, ask yourself, why am I talking? Is it helping me grow, or taking up space someone else should have?Pick one nonviolence or peacemaking resource and actually start it: read the book White Women by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao; read Kazu Haga's Healing Resistance; or sign up for non-violence training. When you learn these tools, ask where they came from and credit the civil rights lineage that built them.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: The Rosa Parks history comes from the Stanford King Institute and the Rosa Parks biography archive. She trained 2 weeks at Highlander Folk School under Septima Clark months before the boycott. The re-entering the room framework traces back to Mia Mingus' 4 Parts of Accountability on her blog, Leaving Evidence. The science on rehearsal building real skill faster than talk alone comes from a 2025 randomized trial on Behaviour Research and Therapy. The modern nonviolence tradition comes from Kazu Haga's Healing Resistance and the Kingian Nonviolence Curriculum. And if you want somewhere to practice this yourself, check out the Telos Group's Principles and Practices of Peacemaking. Support the show

    Rosa Parks Trained for That Bus: Why Peace Is a Practice, Not a Mood

  7. Jul 24

    The Welfare Queen Myth: How Propaganda Picks Who We Fear

    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 held up under research, Jonelle and her mom Karen trace how media and politicians built dehumanizing stories about Black and marginalized communities, and how that propaganda still shapes how we see poverty, crime, and human worth today. They connect The Birth of a Nation to the model minority myth to Bacon's Rebellion, showing how divide-and-conquer propaganda has always protected power by pitting struggling people against each other. Karen turns the mirror toward white women: what narratives do we absorb without questioning, and who benefits when we keep believing them? This is anti-racism work at its most practical, learning to interrogate the propaganda you never chose to believe, and refusing the white savior script that Hollywood keeps selling. Plus a Banned Book Club update, next up is Last Night at the Telegraph Club on August 11, and an honest reflection on grieving whiteness instead of sitting in guilt. Come curious. Stay open. Keep waking up. Calls to Action: Pick one belief you hold about a group of people you don't belong to, and this week trace it back. Where did it come from? A movie, a headline, a politician, a childhood joke? Naming the source is the first act of interrogation.Next time a news story labels someone (a drug addict, a runaway, a high-risk individual), pause and ask what that word is doing. Whose humanity does it erase, and who benefits from you seeing them that way?Notice the white savior story when it shows up in your feed or your favorite film. Instead of asking how you can help, ask how you can make space, step back, and let people of color lead. SHOW NOTES, REFERENCES CITED IN THIS EPISODE: The Birth of a Nation (1915): History.com and Time magazine. The welfare queen and Linda Taylor: PBS NewsHour and Ange-Marie Hancock's book The Politics of Disgust. The super predator myth (John DiIulio, 1995): the Equal Justice Initiative, Retro Report, and The Marshall Project. The crack baby study: Dr. Hallam Hurt's research, reported by WHYY. Model minority origins: William Petersen's 1966 New York Times Magazine article, Success Story, Japanese-American Style. ICE and immigration figures: Human Rights Watch (June 2026), Northwestern University, the Cato Institute, and the American Immigration Council. White savior industrial complex: Teju Cole. Banned Book Club current read: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi; next up, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo. Support the show

    The Welfare Queen Myth: How Propaganda Picks Who We Fear

  8. Jul 17

    White Grief vs. White Guilt: Why Mourning Whiteness Opens Empathy

    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 line between guilt, which centers white feelings and rushes to fix or hide, and grief, which names a specific loss and builds community. Karen introduces the idea of a weeping class, a society that lets itself mourn what could be: love, repair, and systems that let everyone flourish. Jonelle pushes back on whether grief risks re-centering white people, and the two work out how to grieve without asking people of color to hold that grief for us. The conversation lands on three tangible practices for turning white guilt into white grief, and on why a weeping community can hold its own sorrow and still make room for the deeper grief of those who have been oppressed. Calls to Action This week, name one specific loss instead of sitting in vague guilt. Ask yourself: what am I actually grieving here, and can I say it out loud?Notice the next time you reach for a “but” in a hard conversation. Try staying in the discomfort for one more minute instead of rushing to fix or soften it.Find or start your own weeping community. Text one person you can grieve honestly with, so you are not asking people of color to hold your grief for you.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    White Grief vs. White Guilt: Why Mourning Whiteness Opens Empathy
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Jonelle + Karen
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    92
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 White Women Wake Up
  • Show Website
    White Women Wake Up

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