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 asking tough questions, leaning into discomfort, and unlearning old patterns to foster both personal and collective growth.
• Building Connections: Creating a welcoming space for listeners to reflect, share stories, and explore new ways of understanding themselves and the world around them.
• Performative Activism: Learning about how some of our past actions may not be as helpful as we think.

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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 and reshaping culture through fear and paperwork. The conversation examines how book bans confuse opinion with fact, silence marginalized voices, and weaken our ability to understand systems of oppression. Karen and Jonelle ask what is truly at stake when stories about race, gender, grief, and identity disappear from classrooms and libraries, and how white women can step into deeper responsibility for protecting access to truth and representation.

Calls to Action

• Choose a banned book to read this month and share one insight that expanded your empathy.
• Ask your local school board or library how book challenges are handled and how you can support equitable access.
• Talk with a friend or family member about a book that shaped your worldview and why its story still matters today.

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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 often shaped by structural forces. They discuss the discomfort white givers sometimes feel when praise replaces accountability and how real allyship requires understanding the full story behind poverty, imprisonment, and inequity. This episode invites listeners to continue giving with an open heart while also examining the policies, voting habits, and cultural narratives that make generosity necessary in the first place.

Calls to Action

• Reflect on a time you offered help. What parts of the story were missing from your understanding of the system behind the need?
• Learn about one policy in your city or state that directly shapes housing, incarceration, or poverty, and share what you discover with someone in your community.
• Support an organization that centers dignity and systemic change, not charity that reinforces stereotypes.

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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 listeners to choose a mix of personal, relational, and justice-centered commitments. From reading banned books, supporting BIPOC-owned bookstores, and studying one issue of systemic oppression in depth, to amplifying listener stories, collaborating with other podcasts, and building community through a book club, this episode reframes personal growth as something compassionate rather than punishing. Season 2 begins with imagination, play, and a renewed commitment to waking up together.

Calls to Action

• Make your own 2026 Bingo Card and choose intentions that stretch you without shaming you.
• Tell us which intention from our list resonated most and why.
• Nominate a BIPOC-owned bookstore or creator for us to feature this season.

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 ​​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 emotional habits that surface when things get uncomfortable. They discuss the tension between wanting to fix, wanting to comfort, and actually learning to listen. They also share the importance of consuming stories and scholarship from women of color and expanding their sources beyond the dominant narratives they once defaulted to. This episode marks a year of waking up and sets the tone for a new season of intentional, grounded growth.

Calls to Action

• Reflect on one belief you carried into the year that has shifted through listening, learning, or unlearning.
• Commit to one new practice in the new year that disrupts an old pattern, especially around bias or comfort.
• Share this episode with someone who is beginning their own journey of seeing the world with clearer eyes.

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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 expectations we place on others. Together, they examine projection, disappointment, resentment, and the chronic stress that builds when we refuse to release the stories we’ve created about people. Through humor, honesty, and real-life examples, they explore the grief work required to let go of imagined versions of others so we can relate with clarity, compassion, and accountability.

Calls to Action

• Reflect: What version of someone have you been holding onto—and are you ready to release that story?
• Reframe: Notice where projection shows up in your relationships and practice naming what is yours and what is theirs.
• Reset: Choose one belief or expectation you inherited from family, culture, or faith and ask whether it still serves your relationships.

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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 advertising and political imagery. Together, they ask: What happens when the stories we love teach us to normalize inequality? And how can we reimagine representation to build empathy rather than enforce hierarchy? This candid mother-daughter conversation invites listeners to become more conscious viewers—ready to critique what’s on screen and choose what stories deserve our support.

Calls to Action

• Reflect on a favorite movie—what stereotypes does it reinforce or resist?
• Diversify your queue and your watchlist: seek films created by women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented cultures.
• Start a media swap—invite friends to share films that challenge your usual point of view.

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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 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.

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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 broadens to question the systems that turn inclusion into advantage, urging listeners to think about who benefits and who gets left out. With honesty and care, they discuss what it means to make education more equitable, how privilege can be redirected toward fairness, and why genuine inclusion requires more than participation—it requires protection of access for everyone.

 Calls to Action

• Reflect on how privilege influences your education choices.
• Advocate for equitable access in your local schools.
• Support bilingual programs that prioritize community inclusion.

We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] 

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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 distorts what choice and empowerment truly mean. They connect the dots between invisible labor, authenticity, and justice—asking what happens when women sell an illusion of simplicity that depends on hidden help and economic security. Ultimately, the conversation calls for honesty about work, partnership, and privilege—and challenges listeners to uplift women who labor, lead, and create with integrity.

Calls to Action

• Support women-owned businesses with transparency and authenticity.
• Name invisible labor—your own and others’.
• Empower women by celebrating real choice, not curated illusion.

We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] 

Support the show