White Women Wake Up

Jonelle + Karen
  • 3.0 (2)
  • 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. Re-Release—S1:E40 Unmasking Ableism: Rethinking Neurodiversity and Inclusion

    24m ago

    Re-Release—S1:E40 Unmasking Ableism: Rethinking Neurodiversity and Inclusion

    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, the hosts highlight how good intentions—like “modeling” behavior—can unintentionally reinforce exclusion. Instead, real inclusion begins with asking what success and support look like for each individual, and trusting the answers given. From autism and ADHD to dyslexia, anxiety, and more, they call for a shift in perspective: valuing difference as strength rather than deficit. This conversation reminds listeners that creating inclusive spaces is not about making people conform, but about reshaping systems, classrooms, and workplaces to honor the full spectrum of human diversity. Calls to Action Notice ableism when it hides behind conformity or correction.Ask directly: What does support look like for you?Advocate for systems that value difference as strength.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    33 min
  2. The Superiority Complex: Why We Tear Each Other Down to Feel Okay

    Jun 26

    The Superiority Complex: Why We Tear Each Other Down to Feel Okay

    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, and how that instinct scales up into affective polarization, the emotional hostility that divides us along political lines and quietly benefits the people in power. Jonelle pushes the limits of the story. The kindness Karen received came partly because a stranger assumed she was on his side, and the grace extended to a white woman is not the same as the grace extended to a trans person or a person of color. Together they sit in the tension between “calling people in”, the practice Loretta Ross offers as an alternative to public shaming, and refusing to excuse politics that dehumanize others. CALLS TO ACTION This week, notice one person who triggers your bias at first sight. Before you decide who they are, ask what you are assuming, and whether your discomfort is really about them or about protecting your own footing.Pick one relationship where you call someone “like family” or “practically family”. Ask yourself whether they could open the door of your fridge, or whether the closeness lives mostly on your terms.The next time you want to write someone off completely, try “calling them in” instead. You can hold someone accountable for harm and still talk to them like a human being. Notice what shifts in you when you do.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Survey Link: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey Support the show Support the show

    44 min
  3. Corporate America Has a Caste System: Inside the Shadow Workforce

    Jun 19

    Corporate America Has a Caste System: Inside the Shadow Workforce

    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. Together, they map the two-tier workforce: full-time employees with benefits, stock, and a career path on one side, and a fast-growing shadow workforce of contractors on the other, the people who sit at the same desk doing the same job with a different color badge, no benefits, and no way up. They connect it to the 2025 DEI rollbacks, to Isabel Wilkerson's framework of caste as the worn grooves of unthinking expectation, and to the uncomfortable truth that the same companies cutting diversity programs are expanding a contractor class that is disproportionately Black and Latino. Karen names how white women get recruited to enforce patriarchal power, using Bari Weiss at CBS as the example. The episode lands on a fix: stop fighting for benefits for yourself, and start fighting for rights for all, because programs everyone can use are the ones no one can cut. CALLS TO ACTION If you have a full-time job that uses contractors, find out who on your team is classified as what and whether they have healthcare. Awareness leads to change.The next time a benefit or program is framed as helping only one group, ask how it could be designed as rights for all, the version that is much harder to cut.Notice one moment this week where you were asked to use your position to protect power instead of share it, and name it out loud, even just to yourself.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    39 min
  4. We Agreed to Disagree About White Culture. Here's the Fourth Way

    Jun 12

    We Agreed to Disagree About White Culture. Here's the Fourth Way

    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 how white people end up either glorifying a sanitized 'small town' whiteness or reaching for someone else's culture to fill the gap. The real answer, drawn from Beverly Daniel Tatum and Ali Michael, is the fourth way to be white: an antiracist white identity that is neither pride nor guilt. You name the default, drop the shame, claim the lineage of white people who resisted racism, and build belonging through chosen values and heritage told as a story, not as a claim on cultures that were never yours. Karen shares how the safety of her Chicago suburb was built on other people's backs, and Jonelle connects bell hooks’ on consuming the other to the cornrows debate from last week. They close where Toni Morrison left them: if you take racism away, are you any good? The fourth way is how you answer her without flinching. CALLS TO ACTION Catch yourself this week the next time you reach for someone else's culture as a spice, a hairstyle, a phrase, a ritual, and ask what void you were actually trying to fill.Tell one heritage story about your own family as a story, not a claim. 'My grandmother went to a German Lutheran school' instead of 'German culture is mine.'Pick one piece of the fourth way to practice: talk about race openly, learn to spot a system, or build one real cross-racial friendship that is not about your own growth.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Survey Link: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey Support the show

    47 min
  5. 'Get Your Own Culture': The TikTok Question White Women Can't Answer

    Jun 5

    'Get Your Own Culture': The TikTok Question White Women Can't Answer

    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 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 Support the show

    48 min
  6. DEI Rollback: White Women Gained 142K Jobs. Black Women Lost 319K.

    May 29

    DEI Rollback: White Women Gained 142K Jobs. Black Women Lost 319K.

    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 29 percent to 25 percent in a single year, and a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies report showing 200,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce in 2025 alone. Karen and Jonelle work through why white women have been the number one beneficiaries of DEI without realizing it, why patriarchal assimilation made it easy for white women to vote against the very programs that lifted them, and what it actually looks like to defend DEI as white women instead of waiting for white men to do it. The episode also uncovers the buried Black origins of Memorial Day, traced by Yale historian David Blight to a May 1865 ceremony organized by formerly enslaved Charlestonians. CALLS TO ACTION Audit one thing this week. Pull up your company's last DEI report, your alma mater's diversity statement, or your favorite retailer's supplier diversity page, and notice whether the language has quietly disappeared.Pick one Black woman-owned business in your zip code and spend money there before the end of the month. Then tell a friend why you went.Have one DEI conversation with another white woman in your life this week. Not a fight. A real one. Bring the 142K versus 319K number and ask her what she thinks it means.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com We want to create more ways for this community to connect, learn, and take action. Tell us what you actually want here: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey Support the show

    42 min
  7. Mother's Day Was a Protest Before Hallmark Bought It (And Trad Wives Prove It)

    May 22

    Mother's Day Was a Protest Before Hallmark Bought It (And Trad Wives Prove It)

    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 Womanhood, the four Victorian virtues that defined white middle-class womanhood and excluded Black, immigrant, and poor women by design. Karen and Jonelle name the suffrage betrayal, the post-Civil-War flip into the 1950s housewife, and the trad wife movement, using Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm as a case study of how an heir to a billion-dollar fortune sells colonial nostalgia as authentic rural domesticity. Then Jonelle shares the matriarchal AI agent team she has been building in her consulting work, framing distributed web-based leadership as a Trojan horse for breaking down hierarchical systems. Karen lands the episode with six matriarchal values for leadership: decision-makers must bear the cost of their decisions, care work is a political category rather than a personal virtue, power is accountable to the people closest to the problem, conflict cannot be exported, the values matter more than the title, and real matriarchal leadership would cost white women the racial privilege they have traded for proximity to patriarchal power. CALLS TO ACTION Read the full 1870 Julia Ward Howe Mother's Day Proclamation this week. It is in the public domain and a five-minute read. Then ask yourself what you would have to give up to take it seriously as a Mother's Day call to action this year.Pick one of Karen's six matriarchal values and try to apply it to a decision you are making at work or in your family this week. Notice where it bumps against the hierarchical patterns you have been taught are normal.Join us at the Banned Book Club, second Tuesday of every month at 5:15 PM Pacific on Zoom with Becky Hope leading. June's book is Mad Honey. Reading along is welcome but not required. Email hello@whitewomenwakeup.com to register.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com We want to create more ways for this community to connect, learn, and take action. Tell us what you actually want here: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey Support the show

    37 min
  8. Callais, the SAVE Act, and the 69 Million Women Who Might Not Get to Vote

    May 15

    Callais, the SAVE Act, and the 69 Million Women Who Might Not Get to Vote

    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 Rights Act. Within days, Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee began rewriting their congressional maps before the 2026 midterms. Jonelle then connects Callais to the SAVE Act, the bill that passed the House in February 2026 and would force 69 million American women whose married name does not match the name on their birth certificate to produce a passport or extra documentation before they can register to vote. The hosts walk through the parallel to Jim Crow grandfather clauses and poll taxes, the history that white women were not taught about the 19th Amendment, and the uncomfortable data point that white women are the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action while consistently electing the judges and senators who dismantle it. Karen names what most civil rights coverage misses. We do not have language for 'protection,' which is exactly what the Voting Rights Act was. The conversation lands on a usable definition of electoral accountability for white women, and a reminder that 2026 midterm maps are being redrawn right now, including for school boards and state legislatures, where the people drawing the lines actually live. CALLS TO ACTION If you changed your name when you got married, pull up your current voter registration this week and check whether the name on your ID matches the name on your birth certificate. Then tell three other married women in your life what you find.Look up who your school board members and state legislators are, because those are the people drawing the new maps. Pick one local race on the November 2026 ballot you previously would have skipped, and commit to learning the candidates this week.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com We want to create more ways for this community to connect, learn, and take action. Tell us what you actually want here: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-survey Support the show

    41 min
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Ratings & Reviews

3
out of 5
2 Ratings

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
    83
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 White Women Wake Up
  • Show Website
    White Women Wake Up