Why the Concept of Authenticity at Work Often Turns Into a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Burey poses a challenge: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the responsibility of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The driving force for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very frameworks that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, quirks and interests, forcing workers focused on handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Self
Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the confidence to survive what comes out.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the trust to withstand what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a gesture of candor the workplace often applauds as “sincerity” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. When staff turnover wiped out the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to share personally without protection: to face exposure in a structure that praises your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is simultaneously lucid and lyrical. She combines scholarly depth with a manner of kinship: a call for followers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives institutions tell about equity and inclusion, and to reject participation in rituals that maintain unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an declaration of personal dignity in settings that frequently encourage compliance. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book avoids just toss out “sincerity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is far from the unfiltered performance of personality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes alteration by corporate expectations. Rather than considering genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages audience to preserve the parts of it grounded in sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and offices where confidence, fairness and responsibility make {
