How Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Snare for Employees of Color
Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, research, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses co-opt identity, moving the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the publication lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of the book.
It emerges at a period of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that once promised change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – that is, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
Via detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to adjust which identity will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are placed: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to survive what comes out.
As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of candor the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was unstable. After personnel shifts erased the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What remained was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to share personally absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your openness but fails to codify it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once understandable and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: an invitation for readers to lean in, to challenge, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that require gratitude for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to challenge the narratives companies describe about equity and inclusion, and to decline participation in customs that maintain inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that frequently encourage compliance. It is a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book does not simply eliminate “genuineness” entirely: instead, she urges its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is far from the raw display of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than treating authenticity as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sterilized models of transparency, the author encourages followers to preserve the elements of it rooted in truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and offices where trust, equity and answerability make {
