Our Humanity Is Not In Anything We Are, It's In Everything We Do
Philippe Beaudoin · September 23, 2026
I’m in a hotel room in Ottawa. Last night I watched a classic movie. Towards the end the protagonist said something incredibly racist to a room full of people. Nobody flinched. Silent agreement.
As the words came out, I could feel racism solidifying into a collective belief. None of the attendees would repeat the sentence in public, but they would keep believing it.
Our beliefs are simply that: things we say in private. To our teammates when the boss is not around. To our spouse when our mother-in-law leaves. To ourselves, in our inner monologue, all the time.
And honesty? Honesty is not about saying an ineffable objective truth. No, honesty is the act of keeping these variaous dialogues and monologues consistent. It’s ensuring our private words align with our public words.
Our humanity, our shared humanity, starts there. In the words we use, in the gestures we do. In our quest to ensure we stay true to what these gestures mean, no matter who we’re talking to and where we’re talking to them. No matter whether the person is a colleague, a child, a baby, an elderly or, as it happened to me yesterday, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
— “That looks like a good pizza, I’m in the mood for a pizza”, says the strangely extrovert woman sitting alone at the table next to me.
I smile at her and point to the Diavola in the menu.
— “The server said it was their most popular.”
I notice her grey hoodie. She must not be on a business trip.
— “So, what brings you to Ottawa?”, she asks.
— “I am on the board of the organization responsible of computing infrastructure for Canadian researchers.”
— “Oh, you do important work, what’s your organization name?”
— “The Digital Research Alliance. But on a normal day I’m more of an AI researcher.”
— “AI. There’s something I don’t understand.”
I smile and go back to my phone, looking for a few more words in today’s Spelling Bee. This whole conversation feels a bit weird to me. I’m not used to chatting with strangers at restaurants.
Looking at the hexagonal letters on my screen my mind wanders… Who is she? Why didn’t I ask? Would it be strange if I did?
— “And you, are you visiting the city too?”
— “Oh, no, I live across the street, there. I can walk to work.”
— “So you work at the parliament?”, the words feel awkward as soon as I say them. The parliament? But she doesn’t flinch.
— “No, I’m the chief of Canada’s Assembly of First Nations.”
What? What did I hear?
— “Look, this is the dinner I was having yesterday”, she continues, as she pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through her pictures. There she is, having dinner with an Emirati woman. There she is, wearing a traditional headdress. There she is, at the opening kickoff of a CFL game, presenting the team’s logos reimagined by First Nations artists.
And now she’s sitting besides me, alone in front of her pizza, pulling at the cheese with her fork because there’s too much of it.
Later, alone in my hotel room, I would hear a protagonist say racist words. Words that claimed someone was not quite human because of the color of their skin. I would hear them and think people got it so wrong for so long…
We’re not humans because of anything we are, we’re humans because of everything we do.
That’s what Chief Woodhouse Nepinak taught me, without her even knowing.