Why ‘Authenticity’ at Work Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: typical injunctions to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a mix of memoir, studies, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The motivation for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, startups and in global development, filtered through her background as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the core of the book.
It emerges at a time of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to DEI initiatives mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers focused on managing how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to redefine it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and constant performance of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this situation through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication norms. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was unstable. When employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a framework that praises your honesty but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is at once clear and lyrical. She combines academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: an invitation for audience to lean in, to question, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that require gratitude for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives organizations describe about equity and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in practices that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in environments that frequently praise obedience. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book avoids just toss out “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, authenticity is not simply the raw display of individuality that business environment typically applauds, but a more thoughtful harmony between individual principles and one’s actions – an integrity that resists manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of considering genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges audience to preserve the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and workplaces where reliance, justice and responsibility make {
