White Women Wake Up

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

    5d ago

    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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Why White Women Burn Out on Anti-Racism Work, and John Lewis's Answer

    May 8

    Why White Women Burn Out on Anti-Racism Work, and John Lewis's Answer

    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 practices and four outer ones. The four inner principles, faith, patience, study, and truth, are the part that white women tend to want to skip, because doing inner work in private feels safer than doing public, imperfect outer work. The four outer principles, community, peace, love, and reconciliation, are the part Lewis insists must be done collectively, never alone. Jonelle pushes back where the framework hits its limits for white women: when privilege keeps your own life so insulated that intuition cannot find anything wrong to act on. They land on a starting place that feels honest. Look at the injustice you can already see inside your own circle, and treat that as the on-ramp. The work is a marathon, and Lewis is offering a map for staying on the road. CALLS TO ACTION This week, write your own one-sentence mission statement for the anti-racism work you want to be doing. Not what you think you should write. What is actually true for you right now. Read it out loud, and notice what shifts.Pick one of John Lewis's eight principles and live with it for a week. Faith, patience, study, truth, community, peace, love, or reconciliation. Notice where it shows up easily for you, and where it does not. The friction is the practice.Join us at the Banned Book Club, Tuesday, May 12, at 5:15 PM Pacific on Zoom, with Becky Hope leading. Reading along is welcome but not required. Curiosity is the only entry fee.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    41 min
  5. Am I Being a Karen? The White Impulse to Police Strangers

    May 1

    Am I Being a Karen? The White Impulse to Police Strangers

    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 aggressively than non-entitled people, because they feel rule-breakers are getting ahead without deserving it. They trace the impulse from American slave patrols, which deputized all white citizens to police Black movement, to today's neighborhood listservs, where sociologist Maria Lowe found Black men were the residents most frequently flagged as suspicious in liberal, predominantly white communities. They land on a Pacific Northwest case study, Shoreline, Washington, where Resolution 467 commits the city to anti-racism while neighborhood watch groups continue the same racialized monitoring patterns the city is trying to dismantle. Jonelle closes with the practice: minding your business is not passivity. For white people, choosing not to police a stranger is an active discipline. CALLS TO ACTION This week, notice once when you feel the urge to correct a stranger. Pause and ask yourself: are they actually in danger, or are they just annoying me? Whichever answer comes up, sit with it before you act.Pick one moment from your week where you broke a rule, ran a yellow light, parked where you should not have, or took longer than you should have. Hold it next to a moment where someone else broke a rule, and you got irritated. Notice the gap. That gap is the practice.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    38 min
  6. Why Don't We Learn About Reconstruction? White Women and the Lost Cause

    Apr 24

    Why Don't We Learn About Reconstruction? White Women and the Lost Cause

    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 narrative that trained history teachers into the 1970s, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the white Christian women who successfully lobbied Lost Cause textbooks into southern public schools as late as 1980. The through-line that makes this episode land: historians are calling the current rollback of civil rights the largest dismantling since Reconstruction. 591 books by Black authors banned from Pentagon schools. 3.4 billion in HBCU grants frozen. Arlington's Reconstruction pages quietly removed. Karen and Jonelle connect the dots between what was taken from Black communities in 1877 and what is being taken right now, and they make a case for why white women in particular need to know this history, because white women were central to erasing it the first time. CALLS TO ACTION This week, ask yourself what you actually learned about Reconstruction in school. If the answer is nothing or a myth, pick one source from our show notes and spend 30 minutes filling that gap.Notice one moment this week where you, or someone around you, makes a snap judgment about who belongs in a space and who is serving it. Sit in the discomfort of the assumption rather than skipping past it.Find one Black-led Reconstruction historian to follow or read this month. Kidada E. Williams, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the Equal Justice Initiative's Reconstruction in America report are starting points.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    42 min
  7. Code-Switching and Masking: Why These Words Aren't Accessories

    Apr 17

    Code-Switching and Masking: Why These Words Aren't Accessories

    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 autistic community tied to depression, burnout, and suicidality), and why casually using OCD, depression, triggered, or gaslighting as adjectives quietly harms the people those words were built to protect. Jonelle walks through the documented mental health tax of code-switching, Karen names the words she has thrown around without thinking, and together they land on a simple shift: use precise, accurate language for what is actually happening to you, and leave the survival words to the people they were coined to name. CALLS TO ACTION Catch yourself this week. The next time you reach for the word masking, code-switching, OCD, triggered, or depressed to describe your own experience, pause and ask what is actually happening to me, and say that instead.Go read or re-read The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Pay attention to how Starr code-switches between Garden Heights and Williamson, and notice how it fractures her sense of self. That book is the anchor for this entire conversation.Follow and amplify one Black writer on code-switching and one autistic self-advocate on masking this week. Their voices should be the loudest in this conversation, not ours.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    41 min
  8. Indifference Is Not Neutral: The Empathy Gap White Women Don't See

    Apr 10

    Indifference Is Not Neutral: The Empathy Gap White Women Don't See

    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 how indifference showed up in her career when a dean reduced her humanity to a line item, and Jonelle connects the pattern to her own experience navigating medical indifference during an ongoing health crisis. Together, they explore three research-backed theories that explain why indifference thrives in privileged spaces: Construal Level Theory, the Empathy Gap, and Social Baseline Theory, which shows that privilege and self-sufficiency actually train our brains to stop noticing who has no cushion at all. The conversation takes a vulnerable turn when Jonelle names the difference between rest and self-indifference, and how indifference to your own needs can mirror depression. They close with calls to action rooted in proximity, interrupting abstractions, and trusting people's lived stories as truth. If you have ever wondered why not caring feels so normal, this episode names the cost of that indifference and offers a path forward. Banned Book Club: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, meeting this Tuesday. Hosts: Jonelle and Karen Gutowsky Zimmerman. Subscribe, share, and keep waking up. CALLS TO ACTION This week, seek proximity to a life that looks different from yours. Visit a community kitchen, sit in a space where you are the minority, or have a conversation with someone whose daily reality you have never had to consider. Notice what shifts when distance disappears.Catch yourself abstracting. The next time you hear a statistic about homelessness, immigration, or gun violence, pause and ask: do I know one person this number represents? If not, find their story. Read a first-person account, watch a documentary, or listen to a podcast from that community. Turn the number back into a name.Ask yourself: whose weight am I not feeling right now? Sit with the answer. You don't have to fix it today. But naming it is the first step away from indifference and toward empathy.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Support the show

    36 min
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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
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    78
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 White Women Wake Up
  • Show Website
    White Women Wake Up