Why ‘Authenticity’ on the Job May Transform Into a Trap for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: typical advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The driving force for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a time of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and many organizations are reducing the very structures that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to assert that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, quirks and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Identity
By means of colorful examples and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: affective duties, revealing details and constant performance of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what comes out.
According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
The author shows this situation through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of candor the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. However, Burey points out, that improvement was fragile. When employee changes eliminated the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information left with them,” he states tiredly. What remained was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies depend on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once clear and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of solidarity: an offer for followers to engage, to question, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives institutions tell about justice and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in spaces that often praise obedience. It represents a practice of principle rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not merely eliminate “genuineness” entirely: instead, she urges its restoration. According to the author, genuineness is far from the raw display of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate correspondence between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey advises followers to preserve the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and offices where trust, equity and answerability make {
