How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Trap for Employees of Color
Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, author the author issues a provocation: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The impetus for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, startups and in international development, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the core of Authentic.
It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to calibrate which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of assumptions are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this situation through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the organization often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. After staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that celebrates your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is at once clear and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an invitation for followers to participate, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives institutions narrate about equity and belonging, and to reject involvement in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that often reward compliance. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not based on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book does not simply toss out “genuineness” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, sincerity is far from the raw display of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more intentional correspondence between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or conform to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages readers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and offices where confidence, fairness and responsibility make {
