The Ways Being Authentic in the Workplace May Transform Into a Trap for People of Color
Within the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Burey poses a challenge: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Larger Setting
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across business retail, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.
It lands at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona
By means of colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are cast: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to withstand what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.’
Case Study: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the organization often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. Once personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be requested to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that praises your openness but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a tone of connection: an invitation for audience to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that demand thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to question the narratives institutions narrate about fairness and belonging, and to decline participation in rituals that maintain unfairness. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that often reward compliance. It represents a habit of principle rather than defiance, a method of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Her work avoids just eliminate “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of personality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of viewing genuineness as a mandate to overshare or conform to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it grounded in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the aim is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and to relationships and offices where trust, justice and answerability make {