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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.

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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.

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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.

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Roughly 66,000 people are in ICE detention tonight, and about seven in ten have no criminal conviction at all. In this episode, Jonelle traces how that became both legal and profitable, all the way back to a single sentence in the 13th Amendment: the exception clause that abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime." From convict leasing in 1868 Georgia, to the roughly $11 billion a year in prison labor produced at pennies an hour, to private prison companies posting record profits from ICE detention, Jonelle and Karen follow one pattern across 160 years. Slavery did not simply become prison. Each system of racial control keeps dying and returning in a new legal costume, always justified in race-neutral language, always landing on the same communities.

Calls to Action

• This week, look up whether your own state still keeps the 13th Amendment exception clause in its constitution. Roughly 15 states still do, and most people have never checked.
• Learn your rights before you need them. If you see an ICE detention in your community, film from a safe distance, stay calm, and save a local rapid-response number, like United We Dream's MigraWatch hotline, in your phone now.
• Watch the documentary 13th this week, then send this episode to one person and ask them what they were actually taught about how slavery ended.

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Show Notes: The ICE detention figures are from TRAC at Syracuse University, and the analyst Austin Kocher, current as of summer 2026. The prison labor data is from the ACLU and the University of Chicago Global Human Rights Clinic's "Captive Labor" report. The history we walked through comes from Talitha LeFlouria's "Chained in Silence," Sarah Haley's "No Mercy Here," and Elizabeth Hinton's "From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime." The abolition thinking is Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. And the complication is James Forman Jr.'s "Locking Up Our Own.”

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Peacemaking is a skill you train, not a mood you hope to be in. Karen brings a confession: a moment when she spoke unkindly about someone and then asked to re-enter the room and try again, and turns it into a bigger idea: nonviolence and accountability are practiced, not performed. She and Jonelle trace how Rosa Parks trained under Septima Clark at Highlander before the boycott, why role-play changes behavior when intentions don't, and how Mia Mingus' four parts of accountability make a real apology repeatable. They sit with appropriation and attribution, and land on the WAIT practice: why am I talking?

Calls to Action

• Try Karen's re-entering-the-room practice this week. If a conversation leaves you uneasy about who you were in it, go back and ask someone to let you try again out loud. Repair is a skill, and it gets stronger with reps.
• Adopt the WAIT check from the White Woman Whisperer: before you speak in a hard moment, ask yourself, why am I talking? Is it helping me grow, or taking up space someone else should have?
• Pick one nonviolence or peacemaking resource and actually start it: read the book White Women by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao; read Kazu Haga's Healing Resistance; or sign up for non-violence training. When you learn these tools, ask where they came from and credit the civil rights lineage that built them.

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Show Notes: The Rosa Parks history comes from the Stanford King Institute and the Rosa Parks biography archive. She trained 2 weeks at Highlander Folk School under Septima Clark months before the boycott. The re-entering the room framework traces back to Mia Mingus' 4 Parts of Accountability on her blog, Leaving Evidence. The science on rehearsal building real skill faster than talk alone comes from a 2025 randomized trial on Behaviour Research and Therapy. The modern nonviolence tradition comes from Kazu Haga's Healing Resistance and the Kingian Nonviolence Curriculum. And if you want somewhere to practice this yourself, check out the Telos Group's Principles and Practices of Peacemaking.

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Propaganda is a manufactured narrative repeated until it feels like common sense. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Jonelle unpacks the American propaganda that quietly taught us who to fear, who to pity, and who to never think about at all. From the welfare queen Ronald Reagan popularized in 1976, to the super predator panic of the 1990s, to the crack baby myth that never held up under research, Jonelle and her mom Karen trace how media and politicians built dehumanizing stories about Black and marginalized communities, and how that propaganda still shapes how we see poverty, crime, and human worth today.

They connect The Birth of a Nation to the model minority myth to Bacon's Rebellion, showing how divide-and-conquer propaganda has always protected power by pitting struggling people against each other. Karen turns the mirror toward white women: what narratives do we absorb without questioning, and who benefits when we keep believing them? This is anti-racism work at its most practical, learning to interrogate the propaganda you never chose to believe, and refusing the white savior script that Hollywood keeps selling.

Plus a Banned Book Club update, next up is Last Night at the Telegraph Club on August 11, and an honest reflection on grieving whiteness instead of sitting in guilt. Come curious. Stay open. Keep waking up.

Calls to Action:

1. Pick one belief you hold about a group of people you don't belong to, and this week trace it back. Where did it come from? A movie, a headline, a politician, a childhood joke? Naming the source is the first act of interrogation.
2. Next time a news story labels someone (a drug addict, a runaway, a high-risk individual), pause and ask what that word is doing. Whose humanity does it erase, and who benefits from you seeing them that way?
3. Notice the white savior story when it shows up in your feed or your favorite film. Instead of asking how you can help, ask how you can make space, step back, and let people of color lead.

SHOW NOTES, REFERENCES CITED IN THIS EPISODE:

The Birth of a Nation (1915): History.com and Time magazine. The welfare queen and Linda Taylor: PBS NewsHour and Ange-Marie Hancock's book The Politics of Disgust. The super predator myth (John DiIulio, 1995): the Equal Justice Initiative, Retro Report, and The Marshall Project. The crack baby study: Dr. Hallam Hurt's research, reported by WHYY. Model minority origins: William Petersen's 1966 New York Times Magazine article, Success Story, Japanese-American Style. ICE and immigration figures: Human Rights Watch (June 2026), Northwestern University, the Cato Institute, and the American Immigration Council. White savior industrial complex: Teju Cole. Banned Book Club current read: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi; next up, Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo.

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White guilt keeps us defensive and stuck. White grief, the practice of actually mourning what whiteness has cost all of us, is what moves us toward empathy. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Karen brings the topic and asks Jonelle to sit in the physical feeling of mourning a loved one, then carry that same guttural feeling into how we hold race. Together they draw a hard line between guilt, which centers white feelings and rushes to fix or hide, and grief, which names a specific loss and builds community. Karen introduces the idea of a weeping class, a society that lets itself mourn what could be: love, repair, and systems that let everyone flourish. Jonelle pushes back on whether grief risks re-centering white people, and the two work out how to grieve without asking people of color to hold that grief for us. The conversation lands on three tangible practices for turning white guilt into white grief, and on why a weeping community can hold its own sorrow and still make room for the deeper grief of those who have been oppressed.

Calls to Action

• This week, name one specific loss instead of sitting in vague guilt. Ask yourself: what am I actually grieving here, and can I say it out loud?
• Notice the next time you reach for a “but” in a hard conversation. Try staying in the discomfort for one more minute instead of rushing to fix or soften it.
• Find or start your own weeping community. Text one person you can grieve honestly with, so you are not asking people of color to hold your grief for you.

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The United States calls itself the greatest country in the world, yet it is the only wealthy nation with no national paid maternity leave and the only country in the World Cup without socialized medicine. In this episode of White Women Wake Up, Jonelle brings the statistics she could not shake after a Fourth of July and a World Cup steeped in national pride: the U.S. is one of only eight countries on earth with no paid maternity leave, it spends roughly $14,700 per person on healthcare, almost $5,000 more than the next-highest country, and still lands near the bottom of wealthy nations on life expectancy and dead last on the Commonwealth Fund's 2024 Mirror Mirror report. Jonelle and Karen trace how a country this rich cares this poorly for mothers, families, and anyone who needs care, and the answer keeps coming back to racism. In 1945, Truman's national health insurance plan was blocked by Southern Democrats who feared it would force hospitals to desegregate, pushing the U.S. toward the employer-based system we still live under. They talk maternal mortality by race, the state-by-state patchwork of family leave, Estonia and Bulgaria putting the American bar on the floor, and Heather McGhee's drained-pool metaphor: when we refuse to share, we drain the resource for everyone. This is a conversation about the difference between pride and arrogance, and what it would take to stop begging for scraps.

Calls to Action

• This week, notice one place where you have said or thought 'we are the greatest country.' Ask what the number behind it actually is, and who that number leaves out.
• Look up your own state's family leave policy and compare it to the 29-week global average. Then ask whether you have been praising the bare minimum.
• Read or revisit Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us and sit with one shared thing your community has drained rather than shared. Bring it to someone you trust and talk it through.

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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.

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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.

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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 [email protected]

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