Unfurling: An Action-Oriented Oracle Deck to Dismantle White Supremacy

Nora Waters and Wiggy

A tool designed to spark conversations, encourage presence, disrupt fragility, and ignite long-term action within ourselves, our fellow white peers, and our communities in the work of dismantling white supremacy.

This installation was a part of INTER\VIEWS: an inter\active oral history exhibition, showcasing multimedia projects and stories recorded by the 2018-2019 cohort of Columbia University’s Oral History MA program. 

Inspired by a co-created idea from an oral history interview, we are developing an oracle deck to help facilitate sustainable and genuine action in the the work of dismantling white supremacy. As white people, we are continually grappling with how we have been socialized to shy away from introspection and discussions about race and privilege. We are finding it useful to create a tool that disrupts this socialization as well as assists in the connection of the individual and the systemic in collective liberation work.

This project is ongoing! We invite you to continue engaging as our deck unfurls. You can tune in through our instagram and website.

Nora Waters is a multidisciplinary oral historian and printmaker. She has a background in grassroots organizing, and is particularly interested in the intersections of embodied art practices, queerness, and anti-racism. Currently, she is a MA candidate in Oral History at Columbia University and the co-founder of a happening based art collective, Loose Interpretation. Through her multimedia and printmaking courses, Nora has discovered an insatiable urgency to create. She is endlessly inspired by the things she immediately encounters— the things she can see, touch, hear, smell and taste. Using this deck, as well as other practices grounded in relationship building, she wants to continue listening and having challenging conversations about whiteness—within herself, infused in our systems, and the ways these two are deeply intertwined. She believes that small ripples of introspection and empathy are necessary in unraveling systems of oppression and creating larger waves of collective resistance.

Wiggy is a white (primarily German and English ancestry), queer, economically privileged, curious, loving, and deeply emotional human being born on Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute territory (Denver, Colorado). Wiggy currently resides in Bulbancha (New Orleans, Louisiana) and works as a case manager at an HIV health care clinic. Wiggy is very interested in envisioning a world that, on both an individual as well as collective level, operates from a framework of abundance.