The Ways ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Trap for People of Color

In the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The motivation for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the core of her work.

It emerges at a period of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that arena to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of appearances, peculiarities and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Self

By means of colorful examples and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which identity will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are projected: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what comes out.

According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications more manageable. However, Burey points out, that improvement was precarious. Once personnel shifts erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a system that applauds your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories companies narrate about equity and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that sustain unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that typically encourage obedience. It is a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not simply toss out “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to keep the aspects of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into interactions and organizations where reliance, equity and accountability make {