The Ways the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author the author issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of memoir, research, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The motivation for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across business retail, new companies and in global development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of her work.
It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that arena to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and hobbies, keeping workers focused on managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to calibrate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are projected: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to withstand what arises.
As Burey explains, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who decided to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to share his experience – a gesture of candor the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was precarious. After personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when institutions depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: a call for readers to lean in, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts institutions describe about equity and belonging, and to refuse engagement in rituals that sustain inequity. It could involve calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that frequently encourage conformity. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than defiance, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Her work avoids just toss out “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that resists distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sterilized models of transparency, the author encourages readers to keep the aspects of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard authenticity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to relationships and offices where confidence, justice and answerability make {