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. 3d ago

    Living the Values You Post About: NIMBY, Moral Licensing and Showing Up

    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 kitchen. Then it ended it after preschool parents complained about sharing a door. The question is not about that church. It is where your own door is. They walk through Michael Hankinson's research on NIMBY voters in San Francisco who back housing citywide and oppose it nearby, the NIMBY gap in Cambridge (80% of voters for affordable housing, 40% of the people who spoke at meetings), Emory Bogardus's 1925 social distance scale, and Benoit Monin and Dale Miller's work on moral licensing. Karen brings her classroom, and the two push on each other about systems versus personal accountability and how liberal NIMBYism shows up at home. Banned Book Club meets Tuesday, October 13 at 5:15pm Pacific: Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson. Register at whitewomenwakeup.com. Topics: NIMBY, liberal NIMBYism, social distance, moral licensing, performative allyship, youth homelessness, accountability. White Women Wake Up is a mother and daughter podcast about what white women do with the power we already have. CALLS TO ACTION Find your own door. Name one place this week where you say yes to people in general and would flinch if they showed up on your street, at your school or in your church kitchen.Before you decide "not here," ask one more question: who are they, what happened to them, and what would it take?Pick one value on your sign or your feed and do one thing for it this week that nobody will see: call your senator, go to a planning meeting, or hand someone a sandwich.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: Hankinson, M. (2018), American Political Science Review 112(3)  |  2015 San Francisco exit poll, 1,660 voters, plus a national survey of 3,000+: people who back housing citywide oppose it near them. Jonelle at 11:12 said NIMBY was coined in 2015 SF; the term is in print by June 1980. Einstein, Glick, Palmer, Neighborhood Defenders (2019)  |  Cambridge, MA, 2010: 80% of voters backed affordable housing, 40% of meeting speakers did. This is the 80% Jonelle cited at 11:26. Named in the Playback. Bogardus, E. S. (1925), social distance scale  |  Seven steps, from family by marriage to excluded from the country. Jonelle said 'social distancing' and 'Bogartus' at 25:44. Monin & Miller (2001); Effron, Cameron & Monin (2009)  |  Moral licensing and the Obama study. Be aware: a 2024 registered replication (932 people) found no consistent effect. Not said on air. Copy calls it a named pattern, not proof. Hagerman (2018); Lewis & Diamond (2015); Daniels, Nice White Ladies (2021)  |  School research named in the Playback at 34:20. Jessie Daniels' name dropped on air. Krysan & Crowder, Cycle of Segregation (2017)  |  Named in the Playback. The 47/68/74% neighborhood numbers were not said on air. Brooks, D. (2023), How to Know a Person  |  Accompaniment, Karen at 28:46. Cornell 7: PBS NewsHour and CNN, September 28, 2026; Ithaca Voice, September 2026  |  Civil suit filed September 16, 2026; DA reopened criminal investigation; no charges. Jonelle at 20:47 and 29:19 (said 'Cornell 5', corrected to 7 on air). Support the show

    Living the Values You Post About: NIMBY, Moral Licensing and Showing Up

  2. Sep 25

    The Impact of the Excuses We Make: Not All Men. Not My Husband. Not Me.

    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 not being a crime in every state until 1993, and Karen pushes back on whether patriarchy is a value system or the men who uphold it. Then the episode turns. The anger white women feel toward men is the anger Black women feel toward white women: 77 percent of white employees call themselves allies to women of color, and about 10 percent of Black women agree. Macklemore lost a stadium tour in September for saying two words on a stage for people who cannot pay him back, and Ed Sheeran chose what he called neutrality. Most white women are the Ed Sheeran in that story. Neutral is not neutral. It never was. Jonelle closes with what it looks like in real life: the mastermind facilitator who never thought to build an all-women group, the pronouns on your Zoom name, and the bully on the street you would tell your kid to stand up to. CALLS TO ACTION Put your pronouns on your Zoom name and your email signature this week. It costs you nothing, and it is a cue to the person in the room who needs one.Catch one moment this week where you call it "staying out of it," and write down who paid for your quiet.Say one thing out loud in a room where it costs you something small, and tell nobody you did it.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: The numbers in the first half of the show came from the CDC's Maternal Mortality Review Committee, from Donna Hoyert at the National Center for Health Statistics, and from Arthur Mirin at the Journal of Women's Health. The way we use the word misogyny comes from Kate Manne's book Down Girl. The finding that hostility towards men is the highest in the least equal countries is from Peter Glick, Susan Fiske, and 14 colleagues; 8,360 people across 16 nations reported that hostility towards men is when men have complete control. The Macklemore and Ed Sheeran reporting is from ABC News, Variety, Rolling Stone, and Antonio Pequeno at Forbes. In the 1976 case that was brought by Emma DeGraffenreid and 4 other Black women against General Motors. Additional information from Madeline Heilman, Merrick Osborne, and Minda Harts. Support the show

    The Impact of the Excuses We Make: Not All Men. Not My Husband. Not Me.

  3. Sep 18

    Re-Release S1:E6 The Fight for Safe Spaces in Education

    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 challenges faced by transgender and nonbinary youth, particularly in households where disclosure might not feel safe. The hosts also examine how this policy intersects with existing protections like Title IX and broader questions about mental health, safety, and trust in educational settings, offering a nuanced look at this multifaceted issue. Call to Action Educate Yourself on Policies and Protections.Foster Open and Safe Dialogues.Advocate for Student-Centered Policies.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com. Support the show

  4. Sep 11

    You Know Gloria Steinem. Now Meet Dorothy Pitman Hughes.

    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 how the two women met: Pitman Hughes came to New York from Lumpkin, Georgia at nineteen, sang in nightclubs, cleaned houses, and built a multiracial cooperative childcare center on West 80th Street with no funding and no resources. Steinem, then a young magazine columnist, came to write about the center. They toured the country together for years. The press printed one of them. From there, the conversation widens into the four waves of feminism, from Seneca Falls in 1848 through the 19th Amendment that left most Black women unable to vote until 1965, through Betty Friedan and the Redstockings and Shulamith Firestone, through Anita Hill and Kimberlé Crenshaw naming intersectionality, to Tarana Burke and Me Too. Jonelle interrupts twice to ask whether a claim is fact or projection, and once to name that Karen's framing of Steinem sounded like white saviorism. She brings up Latarsha Sanders alongside Lindsay Clancy: two mothers, the same county, the same judge, and only one set of medical records allowed into a courtroom. The episode lands where Karen started it. Learning the name is step one. Repeating it is the work. CALLS TO ACTION Pick one idea you repeated this week and find out who said it first. One search. Then say both names the next time it comes up.Look up the 1971 Dan Wynn portrait in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery collection and read the caption. Notice which name it leads with.Put one book by a Black woman historian in your stack before book club. Martha S. Jones's Vanguard is the one this episode keeps walking into.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at hello@whitewomenwakeup.com Show Notes: In '69, Redstockings speak out, and Steinem's own account of it comes from the Redstockings Archive for Action and Documented History. The story of Dorothy Pitman Hughes comes from historian Laura Lovett's biography, With Her Fist Raised. The Firestone material is drawn from The Dialectic of Sex itself. Tributes to Gloria Steinem are from NPR and CNN. Support the show

    You Know Gloria Steinem. Now Meet Dorothy Pitman Hughes.

  5. Sep 4

    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

  6. 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

  7. 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?

  8. 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
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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
    96
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 White Women Wake Up
  • Show Website
    White Women Wake Up