The Ways ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, writer the author issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The motivation for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.
It emerges at a period of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as resistance to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that landscape to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Self
Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by striving to seem acceptable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of assumptions are placed: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. As the author states, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to withstand what arises.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – an act of openness the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. When personnel shifts erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that praises your transparency but fails to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when companies count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an offer for audience to participate, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to question the narratives organizations narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to decline involvement in rituals that sustain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is offered to the company. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of self-respect in spaces that typically reward compliance. It represents a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book avoids just eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, authenticity is not the raw display of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that opposes manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than treating genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of transparency, Burey advises followers to maintain the parts of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to interactions and workplaces where confidence, fairness and accountability make {
