How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color
In the initial chapters of the book Authentic, writer Burey poses a challenge: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across retail corporations, startups and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that arena to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self
Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear palatable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but without the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this situation through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of transparency the office often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was unstable. Once personnel shifts wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your honesty but refuses to codify it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is both clear and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of kinship: a call for audience to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that demand thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to question the accounts institutions describe about equity and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that sustain unfairness. It could involve calling out discrimination in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is offered to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in settings that often reward compliance. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not merely discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises readers to keep the parts of it grounded in sincerity, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and accountability make {
