The Ways ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the opening pages of the book Authentic, author the author poses a challenge: typical directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, investigation, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The impetus for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the core of Authentic.
It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers concerned with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Identity
By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what arises.
According to the author, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to withstand what emerges.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
The author shows this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to share his experience – an act of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. Once personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a snare when organizations rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is simultaneously lucid and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of solidarity: a call for audience to lean in, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that demand gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to question the narratives organizations narrate about justice and belonging, and to decline engagement in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that typically praise conformity. It is a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not merely discard “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, genuineness is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – an integrity that resists manipulation by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges readers to keep the parts of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and workplaces where reliance, fairness and accountability make {
