The Ways the Concept of Authenticity at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for People of Color
In the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author issues a provocation: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, studies, societal analysis and interviews – seeks to unmask how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are already vulnerable.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of Authentic.
It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to argue that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Identity
Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, disabled individuals – soon understand to modulate which self will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are cast: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the narrative of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. After staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is at once understandable and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a style of kinship: a call for readers to participate, to interrogate, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the narratives organizations narrate about justice and inclusion, and to reject engagement in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of uncompensated “inclusion” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of individual worth in environments that frequently praise compliance. It is a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just discard “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she calls for its restoration. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more intentional correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – a principle that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises followers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and workplaces where reliance, fairness and responsibility make {
