Who is the Mirror For?

Mountain & Lake image

A reflection on reflexivity, hierarchy, and the work we owe ourselves

This reflection continues a conversation we began in August, about radical honesty, selective innocence, and the price of telling the truth. That piece asked us to name the systems we benefit from. This one asks us to name the systems we carry inside ourselves.

In August, the scholar Jason Arday died. He was 41 years old. He was found dead in south London, nine days after resigning his professorship at Cambridge, the youngest Black professor in that university’s 800-year history, in the midst of a public storm over allegations of plagiarism that he denied, and over a life story being picked apart in real time.

We hold his family, his friends, and all who loved him in our thoughts. We do not write this to litigate the allegations, to take a side in a contested story, or to reduce a man to a lesson. We cannot settle what cannot be settled from here, and we do not pretend otherwise. We write this because his life and his death ask us a question we cannot outrun; a question that sits at the heart of the work we do at Seed Room Consulting. And we write it in the spirit of continuing the work he cared about. The question is simple, and yet it is not. Who is the mirror for?

Jason Arday wrote with rare clarity about the machinery of hierarchy. He named the scarcity of Black professors - roughly one in a hundred in British academia. He wrote about the “burden of representation”: how a person who is barely present is conscripted into standing for an entire people, praised beyond their work, and, should they stumble, indicted beyond their offence. He wrote about the routes to intellectual authority, and about the endowment machine; the way elite institutions reproduce themselves by admitting the few and gate keeping the many.

Reflexivity is a mirror. That is the image Arday himself offered us in his work on dismantling power and privilege. Look at your Whiteness, he said. Look at your Eurocentric curriculum. Look at your micro-aggressions. The mirror was pointed at the oppressor, at the academy, at the structures that had excluded him and people like him for so long. And that demand was both real and it was necessary.

But here is a question we offer; one that we want to sit in with you: was that mirror ever meant to face only one way?

In August, we named selective innocence; the deliberate choice to ignore uncomfortable facts and personal complicity while maintaining a posture of moral purity. We named the civilization-level lies, and the price of telling the truth. We asked whether we are well-adjusted participants in harm.

Now we must ask the harder question. The one that turns the lens on ourselves, on the people doing this work, on the ones who think they are on the right side. Is there such a thing as radical innocence and the belief that because we name the system, we are not part of it?

The uncomfortable truth radical honesty demands of us is this: each of us moves through the world in shifting positions. The person who is marginalized in one room is the gatekeeper in another. The one who names the hierarchy can also be the one who quietly reproduces it, by the assumptions we carry, the doors we hold or close, the ways we inherit the very logics that hurt us. Oppressor and oppressed are not fixed identities. They are positions we move through, sometimes without noticing. And the refusal to see that is itself a form of selective innocence.

Jason Arday’s own life held this tension in full view. He was a scholar of racial justice and an elite professor inside the very institution he critiqued. He was the wounded and, in some rooms, the elevated. The system that claimed him as its evidence did not care whether he wanted that role. He was elevated into the very machinery he had spent his career naming, and then, when the questions came, that same machinery tore him down. Prodigy. Fraud. And now, for some, martyr. Three symbols in three years. Never simply a person.

And that is precisely why the question of what we choose matters so much. We keep returning to this truth that reflexivity is a choice. The system will turn us into symbols whether we like it or not. But we can choose, again and again, to turn the mirror on ourselves, not to blame ourselves, but to see ourselves. To notice where we are positioned. To ask what we are reproducing without meaning to. And in that seeing, to begin the slow, undramatic work of dismantling harmful systems from the inside out, and building alternatives that leave room for complexity, nuance, change, interconnectedness, dynamism; the things hierarchy cannot tolerate.

This is the work before the work. The internal groundwork that makes external transformation possible. It is the discipline Arday demanded of the powerful, turned also toward ourselves.

So who is the mirror for? It is for the academy. It is for the oppressor. It is for all of us who move through these systems, wounded and elevated, excluded and gatekeeping, sometimes in the same week. The mirror faces both ways. The question is whether we are brave enough to look.

image of clear glasses with mist over one lens. Source: Unsplash

Radical honesty: a few questions for us

We ask these questions because the work before the work begins in the asking. Sit with them. Let them be uncomfortable.

• Where are you the gatekeeper? We all know where we are wounded. But where, in your work, your family, your community, your church, are you the one trying to control the door? Who are you quietly deciding doesn’t belong?

• What hierarchy do you benefit from, even as you critique it? Arday was elevated into the very machine he named. None of us is outside that. What do you receive from a system you say you want to dismantle?

• When was the last time you told yourself a story that flattered you, and believed it? Radical honesty begins where self-image ends.

• Who have you turned into a symbol? A prodigy, a fraud, a martyr, a saviour, a villain. Who in your life have you stopped seeing as simply a person?

• If the mirror faces both ways, what would you have to change if you actually looked?

Further reading — Jason Arday

• Arday, J. (2019). Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: negotiating normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the Academy. Whiteness and Education.

• Arday, J. (2022). The Black professoriate: assessing the landscape within British higher education. On Education.

• Belluigi, D. Z., Arday, J., & O’Keeffe, J. (2025). The routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire: continued racialised, geopolitical inequalities in the academic staff composition and employment conditions of UK universities. Race Ethnicity and Education, 28(2), 303–329.

Continue the conversation with Seed Room Consulting

• August reflection: “Selective Innocence and the Price of Telling the Truth” — seedroom.ca/blog/radicalhonesty

• Resources, Coursework, Auntea-Ology: The Antidote Dialogues & further learning — seedroom.ca/resources

• Podcast: “Antidote to What?” — https://www.buzzsprout.com/2628105/episodes/19488455

• Podcast: “On Radical Honesty” — https://www.buzzsprout.com/2628105/episodes/19488517

About the author

Mueni Mutinda is co-founder of Seed Room Consulting and an equity consultant with 20+ years of international development experience. Her equity work is grounded in relational accountability, critical consciousness, and radical honesty, and steeped in the practice of sitting with unsettling questions as a framework for unlearning internalized systems of oppression. This piece is part of an ongoing commitment to the work before the work.