How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Snare for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author poses a challenge: typical directives to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, moving the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The motivation for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, startups and in global development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that once promised change and reform. Burey enters that landscape to contend that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Display of Identity
Via colorful examples and interviews, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which identity will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem palatable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to survive what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His willingness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. After personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your openness but refuses to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of solidarity: an offer for audience to lean in, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that expect appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to challenge the accounts institutions narrate about fairness and belonging, and to refuse engagement in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of voluntary “diversity” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that frequently reward conformity. It represents a practice of principle rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely toss out “authenticity” completely: rather, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the raw display of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than treating sincerity as a directive to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of candor, the author encourages followers to keep the elements of it rooted in truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and workplaces where reliance, equity and accountability make {
