SASS string to "non string" - css

Question

I have a scenario where I am using a JSON file in order to dynamically create SASS variables. The plugin (Gulp-json-css) can retain the map and array properties, but does not add quotations onto the map keys:
$palettes : ( white: #ffffff, grey: (lite: #aaaaaa, base: #999999, dark: #666666), black: #000000);
I am running into an issue where map-get() is not able to find the appropriate value if a quoted string is used for the parameter.
map-get($palettes, white) => #ffffff
map-get($palettes, "white") => null
--
Conclusion : (white != "white")
Is there anyway to change a quoted string into an "unquoted" string? I know what you're thinking, but unquote() doesn't work either:
$color : "white";
white == unquote($color) => false
I need a way to turn "white" into white in order to appropriately retrieve the correct value using the map-get() function.
UPDATE / SOLUTION
To whoever comes across this page and is looking for a solution, I ended up writing a function that will loop through a map and add quotes to it's keys:
#function quoteMapKeys( $map )
{
$newMap : ();
#each $key,$value in $map
{
#if type-of($value) == 'map'
{
$value : quoteMapKeys( $value );
}
$newMap : map-merge($newMap, (quote($key):$value));
}
#return $newMap;
}
$palettes : quoteMapKeys( $palettes );