The Ways ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Snare for Minority Workers
In the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Larger Setting
The driving force for the book lies partially in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are reducing the very systems that once promised change and reform. Burey delves into that landscape to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and interests, leaving workers concerned with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the reliance to endure what comes out.’
Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the workplace often praises as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. After employee changes wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is at once clear and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: a call for readers to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. According to the author, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives organizations tell about justice and inclusion, and to reject engagement in customs that maintain inequity. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that often encourage conformity. It is a discipline of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply discard “sincerity” wholesale: instead, she urges its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is far from the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a honesty that resists alteration by corporate expectations. Rather than treating genuineness as a directive to overshare or conform to sterilized models of transparency, the author encourages readers to maintain the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard genuineness but to move it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and offices where reliance, fairness and answerability make {
