How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for Employees of Color
In the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey raises a critical point: typical advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses take over individual identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to staff members who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It emerges at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to assert that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, peculiarities and interests, leaving workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Persona
By means of detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to withstand what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this dynamic through the story of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was unstable. Once employee changes erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your honesty but fails to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is at once lucid and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for audience to lean in, to question, to oppose. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in environments that require appreciation for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to challenge the stories institutions describe about justice and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that perpetuate injustice. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, opting out of unpaid “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that typically reward obedience. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Her work does not merely eliminate “authenticity” entirely: rather, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between individual principles and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than considering sincerity as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges audience to maintain the aspects of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and offices where reliance, fairness and answerability make {
