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White Women Wake Up

Jonelle + Karen

58 episodes

5 days ago

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle unpack the growing conversation around the “male loneliness epidemic” and ask a harder question: who is being asked to carry the emotional labor of fixing it? Moving past media narratives that frame men as victims and women as the solution, they explore how loneliness affects everyone and how patriarchy limits emotional literacy, especially for men. Drawing parallels to the exhaustion BIPOC women experience when asked to educate white ...

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Self-Improvement

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In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle unpack the growing conversation around the “male loneliness epidemic” and ask a harder question: who is being asked to carry the emotional labor of fixing it? Moving past media narratives that frame men as victims and women as the solution, they explore how loneliness affects everyone and how patriarchy limits emotional literacy, especially for men. Drawing parallels to the exhaustion BIPOC women experience when asked to educate white ...

Show more...

Self-Improvement

Episodes (20/58)

White Women Wake Up

Accountability Over Empathy: What the “Male Loneliness” Narrative Reveals About Emotional Labor

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle unpack the growing conversation around the “male loneliness epidemic” and ask a harder question: who is being asked to carry the emotional labor of fixing it? Moving past media narratives that frame men as victims and women as the solution, they explore how loneliness affects everyone and how patriarchy limits emotional literacy, especially for men. Drawing parallels to the exhaustion BIPOC women experience when asked to educate white ...

5 days ago

37 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Re-Release_S1:E10-From Awareness to Action: Challenging Our Own Narratives

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle dive into the complexities of authentic allyship. They share personal stories of confronting privilege—one involving the pitfalls of colorblindness in a multicultural workplace and another about shifting deep-seated biases in personal relationships. Through these reflections, they ask tough questions: Are their efforts performative, or are they truly dismantling privilege and oppression? Acknowledging their privilege as white women, th...

1 week ago

28 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Re-Release_S1:E1- Starting the Journey: Learning, Growing, and Waking Up

This episode introduces a space for honest conversations about self-reflection, personal growth, and navigating privilege. We’ll unpack inherited biases, foster accountability, and explore ways to deepen understanding through open dialogue. Here is a summary of this episode: Different Life Perspectives: A millennial and a baby boomer share their unique experiences and lessons learned as they navigate privilege, bias, and personal growth.The Journey of Growth: Focusing on the importance of ask...

2 weeks ago

28 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Who Controls the Story? White Women, Book Bans, and the Battle for Empathy

In this episode, Karen and Jonelle dig into the rising wave of book bans and why they matter for anyone committed to waking up. Using their own childhood favorites and foundational reads as starting points, they explore how stories expand empathy, reveal hidden histories, and interrupt the narrow narratives many white women inherited. But with thousands of books banned in recent years across forty-five states, a small but powerful group is restricting student access to diverse perspectives an...

3 weeks ago

34 minutes

White Women Wake Up

The Ladder and the Hole: Giving, Systems, and the Stories We Never Tell

In this episode, Karen and Jonelle explore why stories of generosity often stop at the surface. Using examples from holiday giving, volunteer work, and media narratives, they examine how white culture celebrates the ladder that helps someone climb out of a difficult situation while rarely naming the systems that dug the hole in the first place. From incarceration debt to credit barriers to the everyday realities of youth experiencing homelessness, they unpack how individual “bad choices” are ...

1 month ago

33 minutes

White Women Wake Up

A New Season, A New Way to Wake Up

Season 2 opens with a new way to approach growth. Instead of rigid goals shaped by productivity culture, Karen and Jonelle introduce their Bingo Card Intention Framework, a playful system for staying engaged in long-term bias work without shame or burnout. Inspired by a year of learning, discomfort, and community conversations, they explore how shifting from “goals” to “intentions” frees us from perfectionism and opens us to curiosity, joy, and accountability. The Bingo approach encourages li...

1 month ago

34 minutes

White Women Wake Up

What We Learned This Year: Honest Reflection, Hard Lessons, and Waking Up Together

In this anniversary episode, Karen and Jonelle look back at one year of conversations, discomfort, learning, and unlearning. They revisit the heart of their work: examining how inherited biases shape everyday choices, relationships, and assumptions. Together, they explore how humility, listening, and self-awareness changed them more than they expected. What began as a plan to teach quickly became a journey of becoming more honest about their blind spots, cultural conditioning, and the...

1 month ago

38 minutes

White Women Wake Up

When Expectations Break Us — Acceptance, Grief, and Letting People Be Themselves

In this episode, Karen and Jonelle dig into the uncomfortable truth behind accepting people as they are. What starts as a conversation about expectations quickly becomes something more personal: why we struggle to accept the real people in our lives and how much grief sits beneath that struggle. Karen introduces self-discrepancy theory by E. Tory Higgins—the gap between who we are, who we wish we were, and who we believe we ought to be—and how those inner narratives spill outward, shaping the...

1 month ago

33 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Rewriting the Script: How Movies Shape What We Believe About Gender and Power

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle explore how decades of movie tropes have quietly shaped our collective ideas about gender, race, and relationships. From Casablanca to The Goonies, they trace how stereotypes—women as “simps,” men as “bros,” and people of color as caricatures—still echo through modern storytelling. Jonelle reflects on her “classic movie challenge” and what it revealed about how media cultivates bias, while Karen connects these patterns to today’s adver...

2 months ago

32 minutes

White Women Wake Up

The Hard Work of Letting People Be

This week, 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 ...

2 months ago

32 minutes

White Women Wake Up

From Equity to Exclusivity: The Quiet Shift in Dual-Language Schools

Dual-language preschools were created to celebrate cultural and linguistic diversity, yet many are now being reshaped by privilege. This episode looks at how programs once designed for shared language learning have become popular among affluent white families, driving up costs and limiting access for others. Karen and Jonelle explore how good intentions—wanting children to experience another language—can unintentionally reinforce inequity when opportunity becomes exclusive. The conversation b...

2 months ago

32 minutes

White Women Wake Up

The Tradwife Trap: When Branding Masquerades as Empowerment

This week on White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle take a hard look at the tradwife movement—a social media trend romanticizing “traditional” homemaking while quietly monetizing it. Behind the pastel aprons and vintage aesthetics lies a contradiction: many of these so-called traditional wives are entrepreneurs, influencers, and podcasters profiting from the very labor they claim to reject. The hosts unpack how this rebranding of submission as virtue hides real work, reinforces privilege, and...

2 months ago

30 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Beyond the Food Desert: Naming Food Apartheid and the Cost of Systemic Neglect

This week, Karen and Jonelle explore how language shapes awareness—and accountability. What many call “food deserts” are not barren by nature but by design. Coined by activists like Kerry Washington, the term food apartheid more accurately names the systems that segregate communities from affordable, nutritious food. Together, they unpack how profit-driven zoning and racialized neglect turn low-income neighborhoods into nutritional dead zones, driving higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and he...

2 months ago

33 minutes

White Women Wake Up

From Apathy to Action: Naming White Women’s Burnout

Karen and Jonelle explore a term that’s been circulating in activist spaces—white women apathy. But as they dig deeper, they realize the issue isn’t indifference, it’s burnout. Many white women doing diversity and justice work feel emotionally drained, unsure how to keep showing up when progress feels slow or unseen. The hosts challenge the idea that exhaustion equals disengagement, reframing it instead as a signal to rest, re-evaluate, and reconnect with purpose. They discuss how shifting pe...

3 months ago

31 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Psychological Safety: Building Trust Beyond Words

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle explore the concept of psychological safety and why it matters in both personal relationships and professional spaces. Drawing from research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and examples from workplaces like Google, they discuss how true safety means creating an environment where people can admit mistakes, share concerns, and disagree without fear of humiliation or punishment. Karen shares raw reflections from her own classroom and l...

3 months ago

34 minutes

White Women Wake Up

BRAVE Conversations: Finding Meaning in the Mess

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 never neutral and why staying at the table matters. At the center of their conversation is the BRAVE framework: Brea...

3 months ago

35 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Inside and Out: How Social Identity Shapes Our Reactions

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle examine social identity theory—the idea that our self-esteem is often tied to group membership, which leads us to view our “in-group” as good and “outsiders” as bad. Using recent violent events as a lens, they explore why some tragedies spark widespread outcry while others are met with silence. From media coverage that overrepresents white victims to the empathy gap revealed in psychological studies, the conversation reveals how deeply...

3 months ago

32 minutes

White Women Wake Up

From Bias to Belonging: The Power of Interdependence

In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen and Jonelle explore how interdependence transforms the way we challenge bias and build belonging. White women are often taught to strive for independence—doing it all alone—or to slip into codependence, losing themselves in the needs of others. Interdependence offers another path: a shared practice of mutual care, accountability, and authenticity. Through personal stories of failure and resilience, they highlight how choosing community over isolat...

4 months ago

35 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Unmasking Ableism: Rethinking Neurodiversity and Inclusion

In Episode 40 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 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 ...

4 months ago

32 minutes

White Women Wake Up

Breaking the Niceness Trap: Choosing Clarity over Comfort

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 labor and gendered expectations, the hosts explore how vague or coded language can starve learning opportunities, w...

4 months ago

32 minutes