How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey issues a provocation: typical injunctions to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, investigation, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are already vulnerable.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The motivation for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that arena to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – specifically, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers concerned with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
Via detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of assumptions are projected: emotional work, disclosure and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his colleagues about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the office often applauds as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was fragile. Once personnel shifts erased the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that applauds your transparency but refuses to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of solidarity: an offer for audience to engage, to question, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts institutions tell about fairness and belonging, and to refuse engagement in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that frequently praise obedience. It represents a discipline of principle rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book does not simply eliminate “sincerity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of treating genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of transparency, Burey urges followers to preserve the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and workplaces where trust, fairness and answerability make {