How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, writer Burey poses a challenge: typical advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, investigation, societal analysis and interviews – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The driving force for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, startups and in global development, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that arena to contend that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, leaving workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by striving to seem palatable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of assumptions are placed: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what emerges.
As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. After personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What remained was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a framework that praises your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is both understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a style of solidarity: an offer for followers to lean in, to question, to disagree. According to the author, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that demand appreciation for mere inclusion. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the stories organizations describe about justice and inclusion, and to reject involvement in rituals that maintain unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that typically reward conformity. It represents a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply eliminate “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between individual principles and individual deeds – an integrity that resists alteration by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a mandate to overshare or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to maintain the parts of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and to connections and workplaces where reliance, justice and responsibility make {
