The mythologized/as-yet-unrealized wall at the U.S. – Mexico Border.
Corporate walls that put profit before the planet.
The jail walls of the prison-industrial-complex and the school-to-prison pipeline.
Cis-hetero-patriarchy.
The capitalist walls and wedges that try and erode our solidarity.
All colonial borders.
The firewalls that uphold intransparency and impunity.
Settler colonialism.
The paywalls that withold access to life-saving information from the poor.
Gender and its ‘supposed’ binary.
The wall in Palestine.
Racial capitalism and anti-Blackness.
The Walls and structures that continue to oppress, dominate, and exploit.
Being able to turn other people’s realities in to a recreational game is a privilege that most do not have:
Challenge your friends and come see us storm the wall IRL https://www.facebook.com/events/269614120625148/
‘Storm the Wall,’ as we usually see it may simply be a quirky name for an annual campus sporting tradition meant to promote student cohesiveness and act as a well-needed recreational break during the midterm season. But to me, I believe this event hosted by one of Canada’s largest universities, while seemingly benignly apolitical, is inherently a politically-charged defiance of all walls ––from border walls to apartheid walls, digital and physical walls and barriers across the world.
Storm the Wall is a testament to the fact that we, the students, are and have always been the change-makers at the crux of any and every social movement. We have been witnessing the alarming rise of right wing politicians, xenophobic rhetoric from the likes of Donald Trump and beyond, the frantic building of walls as physical, concrete, and even virtual and legal barriers and impediments to the safety, rights, and freedoms of every individual. UBC’s “Storm the Wall” is more than ever a call to action to the masses of students, change-makers, and activists across North America.
The phrase in and of itself speaks volumes to the exact same rallying cries to “storm the walls,” being echoed on stolen Indigenous lands from South Africa to Canada. They echo the calls for the dismantling of the Israeli apartheid wall and the fences and barriers being built to keep out Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands being occupied by colonial Canada’s pipeline constructions and mining projects. “Storm the wall” protests the injustice of further consolidating European colonial legacies of division, hatred, and suppression of the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples on this land.
Have we not studied the histories of the apartheid walls in Berlin and South Africa? Have we not learned from the destruction and chaos of these walls? Can we not translate the same kinds of fear, hatred, pain, and suffering that those walls caused to white bodies in European and settler lands, and realize that we as a collective ‘first world’ entity are invoking the same pain across the colored peoples of this world? From the third world, to the millions of undocumented supposedly illegal migrants on stolen settler land in the United States of AmeriKKKa, to the Gazans and people of the West Bank in Palestine enclosed like prey within Israeli built apartheid walls, to the thousands of nameless individuals indefinitely rotting in dungeon-like immigration detention centres violating UN Human Rights declaration, across Canada, to the oppression of Indigenous peoples through government-built walls, from Tibet to Kurdistan to Kashmir, the creation of these walls cause nothing but suffering across the world over.
UBC’s Storm the Wall is unmistakably reminiscent of worldwide calls to end the creation of arbitrarily-created, militarily-enforced borders. These calls to action demand that these WALLS that are being built around us cannot and should not be allowed: they violate the rights of Indigenous populations, the rights they hold over their lands, and the freedom of movement. These walls are being built by governments directly descended from racist, classist, heteropatriarchal genocidal colonizers, that manifests today in our settler-colonial governments. These walls represent a call to action that many of us are complicit in the misplaced trust in corporate responsibility – by financially-supporting large corporations that allow such border walls to be built, we as individuals are guilty of aiding and abetting the building of such walls constructed on foundations of hate and division.
To me, Storm the Wall represents a call to action, that from the racist US-Mexico border walls being completed, from walls being built to stop activists from re-claiming and asserting Indigenous rights from Standing Rock’s DAPL to Burnaby’s Kinder Morgan Pipeline, we must defy these symbols of racism, bigotry, hatred and divisiveness, and reclaim Indigenous rights from North and South America, to Palestine, and beyond. We must call out state complicity in the building of these walls, the endorsement of apartheid states, Human Rights abuses and state-sponsored violence that is occurring at the site of these walls at the hands of overly militarized border guards and all those complicit in this state-sponsored terrorism, the blatant land rights violations, and the belittling of the value of our humanity.
To any who may argue that there is nothing remotely ‘political’ of UBC’s Storm the Wall – I agree. In fact, Human Rights abuses should never be a question of politics. Human Rights are a question of our shared humanity, and for many, a question of literal life and death. This is a question that we ––as illegal settlers, building walls and states on the blood of Indigenous genocide, we in North America in particular–– cannot have the option of ignoring and must accept responsibility for its consequences. We must advocate against the abuses embodied by walls.
To UBC, and all those intending to ‘Storm the Wall,’ we commend this effort as a true testament to the undying spirit and hope for a better world that breathes through this campus.
We stand against division and hate and, as every year, plan to show our solidarity with ‘Storm The Wall’, a call resonating not just in UBC, but in solidarity with oppressed peoples of our world. We stand with #StormTheWall. Do you?
Please join us outside of the AMS Student Nest on Monday March 25th, 2019 from 3:30 to 5:30 PM, in collaboration with the UBC Social Justice Centre, Color Connected Against Racism, UBC’s Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, UBC Students for Mining Justice, and the UBC Women’s Centre to show support for UBC’s ‘Storm the Wall’ and stand in solidarity with global victims of colonially built walls, and victims of unjust militarization, detention, and violence occurring at such walls.
