How the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for People of Color
Throughout the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and discussions – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of general weariness with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to contend that retreating from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
By means of colorful examples and interviews, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of assumptions are projected: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of Jason, a deaf employee who decided to inform his team members about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the office often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made everyday communications more manageable. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. When personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the culture of access disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What remained was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your honesty but refuses to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an invitation for readers to participate, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of opposing uniformity in environments that expect thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives institutions tell about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in practices that maintain inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in settings that often encourage conformity. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely toss out “authenticity” completely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional correspondence between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a principle that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges followers to preserve the elements of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and answerability make {
