How Being Authentic on the Job Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the beginning sections of the book Authentic, writer the author poses a challenge: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the burden of institutional change on to staff members who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to DEI initiatives mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that arena to assert that retreating from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
Via colorful examples and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.
According to the author, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
Burey demonstrates this situation through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was precarious. When staff turnover erased the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your openness but declines to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a snare when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
The author’s prose is both lucid and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a style of connection: an invitation for followers to engage, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that demand thankfulness for simple belonging. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories organizations narrate about equity and belonging, and to refuse involvement in practices that maintain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the organization. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that frequently praise obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Her work does not simply toss out “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its redefinition. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the raw display of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional harmony between individual principles and individual deeds – a principle that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Instead of considering sincerity as a mandate to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of candor, the author encourages audience to keep the elements of it grounded in sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and workplaces where confidence, fairness and answerability make {
