Why Being Authentic in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how businesses co-opt identity, transferring the weight of organizational transformation on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The impetus for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her background as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of her work.
It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by attempting to look agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the confidence to withstand what comes out.
According to the author, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to educate his team members about deaf culture and communication practices. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. When personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that applauds your openness but refuses to codify it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a trap when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
The author’s prose is both understandable and lyrical. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an offer for readers to participate, to question, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in environments that require appreciation for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts institutions describe about equity and inclusion, and to refuse participation in practices that maintain injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a discussion, withdrawing of voluntary “inclusion” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that frequently reward conformity. It represents a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book avoids just eliminate “sincerity” completely: instead, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, authenticity is far from the raw display of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey advises followers to maintain the elements of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into interactions and offices where confidence, equity and responsibility make {
