How Being Authentic on the Job Often Turns Into a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, research, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Larger Setting
The impetus for the book stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the core of Authentic.
It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that landscape to assert that retreating from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Display of Persona
Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.
According to the author, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
She illustrates this situation through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a behavior of transparency the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. After staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What remained was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies count on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: a call for followers to participate, to interrogate, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that expect appreciation for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to question the narratives companies narrate about equity and acceptance, and to reject involvement in rituals that sustain injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, withdrawing of unpaid “diversity” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is offered to the organization. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that frequently reward compliance. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than defiance, a method of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Her work avoids just toss out “authenticity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that resists manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of viewing genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges followers to preserve the aspects of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into relationships and offices where reliance, justice and accountability make {
