How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for People of Color
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey raises a critical point: everyday injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, research, societal analysis and conversations – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, filtered through her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Identity
By means of vivid anecdotes and discussions, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what emerges.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. When personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be told to expose oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your honesty but declines to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is at once understandable and lyrical. She combines scholarly depth with a style of solidarity: a call for readers to engage, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts companies narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse involvement in customs that maintain injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that frequently encourage compliance. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a way of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just toss out “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to overshare or conform to sterilized models of transparency, Burey advises readers to preserve the elements of it rooted in honesty, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into connections and organizations where trust, fairness and responsibility make {
