Why the Concept of Authenticity on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for People of Color
Within the opening pages of the publication Authentic, author the author issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a combination of memoir, studies, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The motivation for the work lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of her work.
It emerges at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are reducing the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that arena to contend that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Act of Identity
Via detailed stories and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of anticipations are projected: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his team members about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a behavior of candor the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. Once personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your openness but declines to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a trap when organizations rely on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is both lucid and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a style of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to question the accounts companies narrate about equity and belonging, and to decline engagement in practices that sustain unfairness. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “inclusion” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an declaration of personal dignity in settings that frequently encourage obedience. It represents a habit of principle rather than opposition, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not based on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely eliminate “authenticity” entirely: rather, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the unrestricted expression of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and personal behaviors – a principle that opposes alteration by institutional demands. Instead of treating authenticity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises followers to maintain the parts of it based on sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and workplaces where reliance, equity and accountability make {
