A Letter to my peers: On Transitions by Cassandra Garcia 

In this chapter, I discuss the transitional period between being uncertain and being empowered; between being a student and being a teacher; between being acted upon and being an actor yourself.

I love a corny allegory, so please indulge me. Let’s say you’ve gone to see a play and you’re sitting in the crowd starstruck by the actors. You want nothing more than to leave behind the role of the viewer and take on the role of an actor. You want to get on stage. What do you do now? I’ll tell you what I did, and hopefully you’ll find that helpful.

Act 1: Behind the Scenes of the Book You’re Reading.

One of the most common questions that other students ask me is how to get involved in research and the community despite feelings of inadequacy. My biggest piece of advice here is to say yes to every opportunity even if you feel horribly underqualified. I had my own experience with this while working on this project. I applied for the project with the intention of practicing writing job applications and I had no expectation of actually hearing back. So although I was excited when I heard back, I will be honest when I say that I questioned my right to be involved. Little old me! In conversation with incredible people who have more years of experience than I have hairs on my head! Even now I’m shaking in my boots knowing that this chapter is coming right after Desmond Cole’s! My goodness – what big shoes to fill when my feet are still growing.

Regardless, I was brought onto the project first-and-foremost as a volunteer editor. My job was to take care of the audio recording and editing for the podcast. I also had the opportunity to sit in on recording the podcast, so in the spirit of saying yes to every opportunity, I showed up despite having never been on a podcast before and being certain that I had nothing of substance to contribute to the conversation. This was still constructive for me as I got to meet some inspiring people and get some exposure to help shake off the imposter syndrome.

This strategy worked well for the first episode with Sabreina Dahab. I went to the recording session in the morning and then hurried home and cut down all the audio and wrote all the captions and sent the completed podcast off to Kojo that same night. This was incredible for inflating my ego. I felt that I had proven that I was productive and useful and competent and efficient. These are all things that a person occupying such a role should be, surely.

Unfortunately, tying your worth to whether you are useful is a risky business. We filmed the second podcast episode with Ruth Rodney and Sabreina Dahab. You don’t know about this episode because the audio was corrupted and all my attempts to recover the audio were fruitless. That was my second major roadblock, and it only seemed to confirm that I was severely underqualified for the position. There is no happy ending here because at this point I hadn’t developed the stability of mind to recognize that setbacks are normal and expected. Maybe this is something you can relate to – tying your worth to one little facet of yourself or one little ability you pride yourself in that you inflate to encompass your entire being. For me, that was how useful I was and how competent I was academically. The problem with this is that one little failure to perform that little quality also becomes an attack on your larger personhood. The corrupted audio file was not simply a corrupted audio file – it was proof that I was taking up space that I shouldn’t.

One Friday afternoon when I was still in the process of lamenting the corrupted audio, I was waiting for the bus home from Wentworth and struck up a conversation with a man waiting at the same stop. He asked what my plans were for the day and I grimly said I was going to spend the day staring at numbers in VLC and Audacity until I stopped hearing static screaming and started hearing words. After I told him about my trials and tribulations, he told me he was demolishing a Shoppers Drug Mart inside a mall. He was very adamant that this was entirely legal and sanctioned because he works in construction. I concluded that he works in demolition, really, but he called it construction for some reason or another.

That confused me. I asked him why he called himself a construction worker if he was destroying things rather than building them. And he said that he was a construction worker, and demolishing things was just a little part of his job that he specialized in. Now that got me thinking. It is quite a long bus ride home from Wentworth, so I had time to really ponder. This man destroys things, but he doesn’t call himself a destruction worker. In fact, he specializes in destroying things, and he still doesn’t call himself a destruction worker. He had one little facet of his job (destroying things) that he took pride in specializing in and yet he did not allow that to be the facet that encompassed his whole job, let alone his whole being. If I were him I would be walking around telling everyone I met that I am a destruction man and I get to swing around a wrecking ball and I am incredibly qualified to do so and you should call me if you ever need someone to smash up a concrete slab.

We should all think more like that construction man who destroys buildings for a living. You can have a skill without making it the cornerstone of your identity. It’s silly for a construction worker to put all his self worth into how good he is at destroying things. So why should a person put all their self worth into how useful and productive they are? He is a construction worker, not a destroyer. You are a person, not a tool.

After that bus ride home, I opened Audacity and I was totally serene. I never did manage to salvage the audio, and that’s okay. We recorded a third episode with Koubra Haggar and our star interviewee Sabraiena Dahab, and the editing process went just as smoothly as the first episode.

I would like to dedicate this section to the construction worker at the bus stop. Thank you for the conversation.

Act 2: Being Taught Magic Tricks by a 7th Grader.

Meanwhile, I had embarked on a sidequest that would send shivers down the spine of any grown man: I returned to middle school. Fortunately, I was doing a community engagement placement through the McMaster Children and Youth University, so it was a carefully controlled and pleasant experience in comparison to my stint as a middle schooler. The elementary school I was working in was on the east end of Hamilton, and I was visiting a seventh grade classroom to create and conduct a workshop series about engineering sustainable buildings. This situation was, yet again, comical because I am not an engineer and the class already had a teaching assistant present who was going through teacher’s college to teach physics.

While I was in the elementary classroom to teach, I was also there to put my learning about engaged teaching pedagogies into practice. I found that it was not useful to silo systems of knowledge based on who conceived them or where they were conceived. Rather, synthesizing epistemologies from different people offers a fuller and richer perspective. bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang were major sources for me despite all coming from vastly different perspectives. Strong and lasting theory is not pulled out of thin air – it is the aggregate of people’s experiences and observations that allow for more streamlined communication of common phenomena. No single person has all the answers or is capable of seeing from all perspectives, so pulling from multiple wells can better quench your thirst for knowledge.

Although reading theory is a good introduction, it does not mean very much if there is a disconnect from praxis. Tuck & Yang argue in Decolonization is not a Metaphor that true decolonization is the act of returning land and life back to Indigenous people; they describe anything short of this as a move to innocence that merely decolonizes the mind (Tuck & Yang, 2012). This decolonization of the mind involves achieving an acute awareness of social and political conditions and is the first step of Paulo Freire’s concept of critical consciousness (Freire, 2000). Critical consciousness involves not only awareness, but also action that meaningfully addresses oppressive systems. Decolonization of the mind is not the goal – it is only the first step towards liberation.

A topical example of this concept is the Blackout Tuesday initiative that was held in June 2020, wherein millions of people posted black squares to their Instagram pages. These people were “woke” (or critically conscious) to the social reality of Black people’s marginalization. However, for many of these people, their activism started and ended with black squares, and much of the actual resources and information being shared was drowned out by them. The black squares only served to make individual people feel better about themselves and the decolonization of their own minds, and made no positive difference to the world or people around them. You could argue that the black squares raised awareness, but again, this awareness came with no information and ultimately means nothing without action. Similarly, the act of reading theory in an attempt to become critically conscious is only useful for your own mind unless you make an effort to bring it into practice. So although I once again thought I was very underqualified to be teaching thirty twelve year-olds about which materials are the best insulators to use in a steadily warming climate, I very bravely travelled down to Stoney Creek at 7am to try my hand at liberatory education.

Liberatory education is important due to the prevalence of what Freire calls the banking model of education. In this model, students are treated as empty, ignorant vessels into which knowledge is deposited by a knowledgeable teacher (Freire, 2000). The emphasis is not on critical thinking, but on memorization and regurgitation. Under the banking model, Freire describes the student as being “alienated like the slave [. . .] but unlike the slave, they never discover that they educate the teacher” (p. 72). This comparison of pupilhood to enslavement is an apt one. Tuck & Yang refer to any personhood that enslaved people display as an “excess” to the commodity of labour that they are valued for providing (2012, p. 6). This process of alienation and the dichotomy between being simultaneously valued and devalued is further reflected in hooks’ argument that academia favours a mind/body split (1994). Within education, this mind/body split refers to the compartmentalization of an academic’s physical body (including race, gender, social class, etc.) and how it shapes their lived experiences in order to center their value in whether or not their mind is functional and productive. It is clear that the student is valued for their subservient pupilhood rather than for their salient personhood, which is where the need for liberatory education arises.

Freire developed critical pedagogy as a counter to the banking model of education, which instead encourages the oppressed student to liberate themselves through collaborative acts of cognition, participation, and dialogue that change the way that they think and behave (2000). hooks later developed engaged pedagogy, which builds upon critical pedagogy through incorporating Thich Nhat Hanh’s framing of an educator as a healer (hooks, 1994). While critical pedagogy is concerned with dissolving the oppressive hierarchy between teacher and student, engaged pedagogy is more holistic and is concerned with dissolving the mind/body split to support the wellbeing of both teacher and student (Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994). I believe both Freire and hooks’ epistemologies can be true: students can liberate and teachers can heal, and vice versa. However, the onus of action should not be entirely on one or the other, but should rather be a collaborative act between peers. Even with all this in mind, I knew what I would be doing in the classroom would not be true decolonial work as the modern classroom was built on a settler colonial foundation. It was meaningful work, but it was not decolonization.

In Teaching to Transgress, hooks places a heavier emphasis on engaged pedagogy in relation to race, gender, and class through incorporating her observations of classroom dynamics (1994). Most relevantly, she notes that students’ self-evaluation of themselves as learners is shaped by what they have been made to believe by their teachers. She describes how many of the low-income and racialized students that she taught in state schools were equally as bright as those at more prestigious institutions; however, they did not consider themselves to be intelligent as a result of being put down by their teachers. After years of being told that they were less intelligent than their white and upper class peers, they began to believe it. A similar phenomenon occurs wherein students learn to recognize that their place as learners is to absorb rather than to engage or contribute.

I saw many of hooks’ observations reflected in my time in the classroom. A common occurrence was students having great ideas, but being afraid to write them down because they were not sure how to spell, or were not sure if their ideas were good enough. Addressing feelings of inadequacy was easy, as giving feedback was appropriate – I simply had to use language that was familiar to them to tell them, “You’re eating! You’re cooking!” and that would get them excited about participating. However, the fear of being unable to spell was an opportunity for me to forgo the easy route of giving feedback (wherein I would tell them how to spell the word), and instead meet them at their level. They would ask me, “How do you spell ‘access’?” and I would respond, “Honestly, I have no idea. Are there any spellers in chat who know how to spell ‘access?’” This would invite someone else to lend a hand. Oftentimes, they would work together to figure out how it was spelled. After a while, they began asking each other for help without any prompting, ultimately removing the fear of being judged entirely.

During the second workshop session, I showed one of the students a simple magic trick. He asked me to explain how I did it, and I gave him the whole spiel about how a magician never reveals their secrets and he should see if he could figure it out on his own. I forgot about the exchange entirely, as it was a three minute conversation in the middle of an hour and a half of heat-loss experiments. Apparently he didn’t forget though, because he came up to me during the third workshop and showed me that he had figured out the magic trick. Not only that, but he said he was learning some other tricks that he would show me next time I saw him.

Although it seems insignificant, approaching teaching and learning not as a hierarchical structure wherein knowledge is passed down from teacher to student, but instead as a horizontally linear structure between peers empowered the students to share their knowledge with each other. This change was as small as me showing one student a magic trick on the first meeting, consequently inspiring him to research a magic trick to show me on the second meeting; and it was as big as them taking control of their project entirely and simply telling me what they needed me to do to help them. This blurred the teacher-student divide entirely. Now they were the teachers, too.

With this in mind, what I found most important was knowing my audience. I went into the placement thinking “I need to be incredibly professional.” Thirty seconds into speaking with the students, I realized they did not need nor want me to be professional. Consequently, I let go of the corporate code-switch and talked to them like they were just regular people. I found that I could say anything to them and get them to do any task as long as I phrased it in a way they found amusing. They particularly liked when I would give them nicknames that framed them as the go-to expert for the task they were assigned. During the second workshop, one of the students was nervous about presenting some data to the class, so I introduced him as our group’s Math Guy. Any time I needed to encourage him to focus or participate, it was much more effective to say “Math Guy, lock in! The city needs you!” After this, he started calling himself Math Guy, and he was much more confident and willing to engage in the data analysis activity.

However, it was also important to remember not to apply blanket solutions to every student. I had one student who did not like being called Master Plan Guy, and just wanted to be called his name instead. That was okay, too. Although mundane, this was an interesting application of Tuck & Yang’s argument that humanity is considered an “excess” (2012, p. 6). Tuck & Yang discuss this topic specifically from the perspective of people being valued solely for their labour. This student did not like that we were calling him Master Plan Guy. Maybe he just thought it was uncool, or maybe he did not like that he was being named after his labour. Regardless, he chose to be called by his name, and choosing what you are called is a powerful reclaiming of personhood in and of itself.

Being put into a position where I was explicitly the “teacher” and was looked up to by students as the Bringer Of Knowledge was a strange shift. It revealed two things: first, even people who you may consider to be more experienced than you have no idea what they’re doing half the time. Second, everyone is both a student and a teacher. Neither your age nor the way you speak negate this. Much of the language that is associated with young people is actually just Black Vernacular English (often also called African-American Vernacular English or Ebonics), so I do not think it is productive nor appropriate to teach them that the way they speak is unacceptable or unprofessional. bell hooks writes about how young white children sometimes imitate Black vernacular in a manner that trivializes it and suggests that it is used by “those who are stupid or who are only interested in entertaining or being funny” (1994, p. 171). However, hooks also writes about how vernacular language allows us to liberate ourselves and heal the mind/body split through shaping the dominant language to fit our cultural needs. Effort should be made to incorporate into academic settings language that Black students grow up speaking, because reinforcing that Black vernacular should not be spoken in the classroom undermines the reality that it is a legitimate and fully fledged language.

On the other hand, it is also important to recognize that 49% of Canadians aged 16+ have a reading proficiency below level 3, meaning they score below high school literacy levels (Statistics Canada, 2024; United for Literacy, 2022). Expanding accessibility of language to include younger children is a prime example of how making deliberate changes that include the most marginalized members of society only serves to benefit everyone. Further, although they may not be the commonly accepted or professional standard, familiar language and casual humour relax people and make them feel included. I often say that simplicity of language does not entail simplicity of ideas. But talking to a group of kids teaches you that silliness of dissemination does not entail silliness of ideas.

I would like to dedicate this section to the pre-teen who showed me that cool magic trick. Thank you for helping me put liberatory pedagogy into practice.

Act 3: Excel.

Fast forward a couple months. Now it’s April. I have escaped the middle school largely unscathed and the textbook is in its final stages. Now I have found myself working on a different community research project entirely – this time investigating police use-of-force in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). By this point I already had research experience, but I still had some doubts about my capabilities. Most of the research I had done was relatively low-stakes, and involved sociological and linguistic research methods that I was intimately familiar with. The most glaring issue for this new project was that it took place largely in an Excel workbook and I had a rudimentary grasp of Excel at best.

Every year, the solicitor general releases statistical data on use-of-force in Ontario. These sheets have historically not been very well organized, but the data released in 2023 was particularly unreadable. Every year prior, there was one big Excel sheet that was released that compiled the information that our project was most concerned about: the demographic data (that is, race, age, and gender) and the location data. For some sick and twisted reason, instead of releasing everything in one sheet as usual, the data was scattered between FOUR (4!) separate sheets in 2023. The location data was separate from the demographic data, and the only common link was a series ambiguously called “BatchFileName.” Worse still, not every batch file name was represented on every sheet. There were several cases that had a batch file on the “Main” data sheet that didn’t have a matching report on the “Individual Sheet,” meaning we know a use-of-force incident occurred, but we had no way of knowing who the individual targeted was.

This was a grueling process. Regardless, I am still a student and I am severely unemployed. My only inelastic financial demands are rent, tuition, groceries, and movie tickets at the Playhouse Cinema. If anyone has the ability to volunteer a couple hours a week for a community research project, it would be someone in my situation. If even I find myself struggling to straighten out these Excel sheets, how would somebody without access to the same resources as me manage to do so? Worse still, how would they do this if they had additional real-world, non-student responsibilities and time constraints? I realized that I needed to lock in. I was Excel Guy now, and the city needed me.

Some preliminary research revealed that I should use Power Query to merge the tables. This was no better than telling me the solution was alchemy and arcane magic. So I once again took to the internet to figure out my formula escapades and a five-year-old reddit thread told me I should use =XLookup instead of =VLookup. Surely there is some poor soul out there who is reading this and thinking to themselves that there is a better, more efficient, more obvious answer than =XLookup that would have solved my problem. If only you were there to tell me. Anyways, I went home and tried =XLookup and it worked perfectly and I had a great time going to bed at a reasonable hour that night.

I will spare you from the technical details past this point. More important is what the data revealed once it was all pieced together. It is integral to mention that the use-of-force data released by the solicitor general is based on what the officer perceived the person’s race to be. As such, there may be some discrepancy due to differences in perceived versus actual race. Regardless, I worked with what I had and created some graphs to make the spreadsheets more digestible for you. Let’s look at Hamilton first, which had a total of 445 use-of-force incidents in 2023 (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025):

In Hamilton, 35.7% of use-of-force cases involve racialized and Indigenous people, while only 24.8% of the city’s population is racialized (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025; Statistics Canada, 2023). This disparity is even more glaring when considering that 16.6% of use-of-force cases involve Black people, while only 5% of the city’s population is Black. One of the points that would have appeared in 2022’s data is Marcus Charles, who was tasered by police while having a seizure (Brown, 2024). Charles was charged with three counts of assault, which were later dropped. Charles’ experience highlights how officers are inadequately trained to respond to medical issues, as well as how racialization can result in being labeled a “combative patient” (Brown, 2024).

There are a few regions in Ontario that are particularly shocking in their use-of-force disparities. Take for example Toronto, which had a total of 3137 use-of-force incidents in 2023 (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025):

In Toronto, 70.5% of use-of-force cases involve racialized and Indigenous people, while only 55% of the city’s population is racialized (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025; Statistics Canada, 2023). Further, 39.3% of use-of-force cases involve Black people, while only 9.5% of the city’s population is Black. One of the points on the graph is Pro-Palestinian protester Adam Melanson, who was violently dogpiled by multiple officers after attempting to defend his wife who was knocked to the ground by an officer (CBC News, 2023; Talbot, 2024). Despite video footage of the incident, Toronto Police Services released a statement denying that the officer “place[d] his knee on the suspect’s neck,” and maintained that “officers are trained to use the amount of force necessary to render a situation safe for all involved” (Talbot, 2024). Melanson’s experience highlights how, despite current training, officers on the ground continue to act in violent ways that they should not be. Further, the incident exemplifies officer denial of people’s experiences even when adequately documented through video.

Black people’s experiences with the police in Hamilton and Toronto are reflected by Indigenous people’s experiences with the police in Thunder Bay, where there was a total of 232 use-of-force incidents in 2023 (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025):

In Thunder Bay, 64.2% of all use-of-force incidents involved racialized and Indigenous people, while only 15.9% of the population is racialized (Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit, 2025; Statistics Canada, 2023). Most glaringly, 46.5% of use-of-force cases involve Indigenous people, while only 15.9% of the city’s population identifies as Indigenous. One of the points that would have appeared in 2022’s data is John Semerling, a 61-year-old Métis man who sustained a broken nose and a concussion after an officer stuck him four times on the head during a mental wellness check at his home (Turner, 2023). Semerling’s experience occurs within the wider context of the Thunder Bay Police Department’s failure to adequately investigate and provide answers for dozens of sudden deaths of Indigenous men, women, children, and babies (APTN National News, 2024; Ward & Jackson, 2022). Thunder Bay highlights the systemic racism that occurs within policing, and how it only worsens with time if it goes unchecked.

I have chosen to highlight Toronto and Thunder Bay because there are two major standouts in the data: first, Black and Indigenous people are not only proportionally overrepresented in use-of-force cases, but are also the most-targeted groups overall; and second, the people targeted are often quite young. I supplemented the data with cases because looking at data alone does not tell the whole story. Data is sterile and factual, and can be manipulated to push any narrative the wielder wants. Further, there is a large emotional difference between 3814 points on a graph and 3814 people – I only introduced you to three. The graphs I showed you may have felt egregious, but they pale in comparison to looking at each and every individual person they represent in the eye.

This is not a new issue, and I am not the first person to speak about it. In Hamilton, the Afro-Canadian Caribbean Association, the Hamilton Anti-Racism Resource Centre, and Black community members penned a letter calling out the Hamilton Police Service for their continued refusal and neglect to include the contributions and experiences of racialized community members while making plans to address systemic racism (HARRC, 2024). In Toronto, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (2023) released From Impact to Action – a 10-chapter report detailing anti-Black racism perpetuated by the Toronto Police Service which included over a hundred recommendations for action. In Thunder Bay, officer corruption and incompetence have prompted First Nations leaders to repeatedly call for the disbandment of “the poison that is the Thunder Bay Police Service” (Diaczuk, 2024). This is an ongoing, ubiquitous trend that has been acknowledged by grassroots organizations, government bodies, and community members for decades.

Now equipped with 2023’s data, I went to the community meeting that the Hamilton police department was holding for the release of 2024’s data. The meeting was not good. The hall was crawling with police, most of which were white men. There were some technical difficulties beforehand that caused the meeting to start late. Presenting at the front of the room was what I can only describe as the officer decoy team. A Black woman opened the presentation and introduced the speakers. An Asian man presented some statistics. An Indigenous woman explained why it wasn’t feasible to record actual racial data – only what the offending officer perceived the victim’s race to be. You get the idea. But despite the racialization of the presenting officers in front of us, standing in a row along the wall behind us was just under a dozen white male officers – all of them armed and in uniform.

This was ominous. A major purpose of the report is to shed light on the racial disparities in use-of-force victims, and they strategically chose racialized police to pacify the community with representation. This community meeting showed how representation can be weaponized through tokenism. Yes, a Black woman officer was present, but she was selected out of a dozen homogenous white male officers to introduce race-based data to a room of rightfully upset community members.

The meeting was supposed to run from 6pm until 7:30pm, with time at the end for questions. Throughout the presentation, a few people had questions but were told to wait until the end of the presentation. The presentation didn’t end until 7:45, at which point quite a few people had already left at the agreed upon ending time. This felt like another way to silence the community and give the illusion of collaboration. Running over time allowed the police to release their information and express their narrative while going unchallenged by people who had rightfully assumed that they would have allotted time to engage in discussion. The post-meeting discussion ended up running until 8:20.

During the discussion, a few concerns were raised and all of them were given polite but non-committal acknowledgement. The request to release data not only for perceived firearms but also for whether there actually was a firearm present was treated particularly egregiously. It was clear that this same request had been made repeatedly over the prior three years, and that last year promises had been made to include this information, but the promise was not delivered on. There was significant pushback from the officers (particularly the white men along the back wall), who seemed to be willfully misinterpreting the request for the release of data as a request for officers to change their call response. This discussion went around in circles until the chief stepped in and said to email him directly and he would “make it happen.” If the last three years are any indication, I am not convinced that he will make it happen.

It was clear that these were empty promises to placate the community. Despite this, the solution is not to stop attending the meetings under the justification that they will be fruitless. Rather, a significant part of the solution is to attend the meetings and to keep complaining. The police would love it if they could enter an empty board room and present their information about how many young Black boys they beat down in the streets to no pushback. Do not give them what they want, because then nothing will change.

With this in mind, it is also important to mention that I was likely the youngest person in that room. Despite my age group being the one of the most highly targeted in use-of-force cases, we were not present in the information session. As I currently write this in June 2025, 14.2% of Canadian youth are unemployed (Statistics Canada, 2025). Unemployed youth have the privilege of having time and flexibility to protest and attend meetings. I ask this as a fellow jobless youth: there is a severe lack of youth engagement… Where are we at? Because it’s clearly not at work. This could be for any number of reasons, but I will say that it is integral that young people get involved in community issues because we are often the silent victims of them and our silence is to the detriment of our community as a whole. One of these reasons may simply be that the police have neglected to spread their meeting invitations to people other than news reporters, organizations, and university professors. So please take my account as notice that there is an annual use-of-force report community meeting that you can attend in Hamilton. Maybe the police didn’t want you to know this information, and that should be even more motivation for you to go and make them see you and hear you.

Eight days later, there was a more official city hall meeting that went over the same data. I’ll spare you the details here, as the meeting was publicly livestreamed and recorded and you can watch it yourself in its entirety if you are so inclined. But I mention this meeting because Police Chief Frank Bergen used us, the attendees of the use-of-force information session, as sterile data points to push his own narrative. One of the board members, Anjali Menezes, questioned why the officers present at the use-of-force meeting were all armed and in uniform, considering they were in plainclothes the previous year. The chief said that “out of the 25 people at the meeting, that did not come up” (Hamilton Police Services Board, 2025). I can assure you that the police chief did not personally ask me my opinion on the matter, but since I was present and silent, I was able to be used as a data point in his favour. I brought this up to Kojo directly after the meeting and I wrote about it in this chapter, but Chief Frank Bergen didn’t make the effort to investigate my qualitative opinion to supplement his quantitative data. Interestingly, Bergen himself acknowledges that “just the raw numbers without context is a dangerous way to interpret them” (CHCH News, 2023). Similarly to the use-of-force data that I showed you earlier, situations like this are why making people’s stories heard and refusing to rely solely on quantitative data is so important.

If there is one thing that the Excel sheets and the community meetings made clear, it is that people in positions of power are purposely obfuscating the information with the hopes that it will deter us from sitting down and prying it open. This is even more reason for us to share our knowledge with each other. You may think what you have to say is rather unrevolutionary, but please, tell me which Excel formula will merge these four spreadsheets together! Sure, it’s simple, but I don’t know it, and you do!

I would like to dedicate this section to the kind stranger who existed on the internet a half-decade ago. Thank you for teaching me Excel.

Epilogue: Tying it all Together.

At the beginning of this chapter I said I would help you get on stage. By now you know that you’re already on it. There is no audience, and you were never part of it. What are you going to do now?

It’s quite comical really, how everything falls into place when you put in the work to engage with your community. The construction man showed me that you never know how your work will be meaningful. The middle schooler showed me that you never know to whom your work will be meaningful. The reddit user showed me that you never know when your work will be meaningful. Like characters in a play, we all have an important role to fill, even if we are unaware of it. Even the smallest roles support the other actors and help the play move forward, so it is integral that we all come to the show. Your work will be meaningful.

I will summarize my advice to you:

1. Apply to everything you are interested in. Why preemptively say no to yourself before someone else says no to you? Other people only have the opportunity to say yes to you if you say yes to yourself first.
2. Show up at every opportunity. It might not be the path you were planning on, but you might as well take it because you never know where you’ll end up. You could get somewhere that you didn’t even know was an option.
3. Don’t stop complaining. Nothing will change if you stay quiet. In fact, they want you to stay quiet. Don’t give them what they want.
4. Teach and be taught. In every project I was involved in, I was taught something by an unexpected source: a Demolition-Construction Worker, a 7th Grader, and a Lost Redditor from the Past. Let this also be a lesson to you: why can’t you also be that source of knowledge?

Think of the Reddit user who posted a comment five years ago that helped me in the present. I hope this book can be the same for you. Although I have finished writing this chapter and you have finished reading it, we both still have work in progress that will be picked up and built upon by others after us. We all have something to learn and we all have something to teach. So, please, meet me at the library. I’ll teach you Excel if you teach me how to uncorrupt audio.

References

Anti-Racism Strategy and Analysis Unit. (2025, June 17). Police Use of Force Race-Based Data. Ontario Data Catalogue. Retrieved May 14, 2025, from https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/police-use-of-force-race-based-data

APTN National News. (2024, April 22). First Nations leaders in Ontario issue call to disband Thunder Bay police. APTN News. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/first-nations-leaders-in-ontario-issue-call-to-disband-thunder-bay-police/

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