How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Often Turns Into a Trap for Employees of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author Burey raises a critical point: everyday injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across retail corporations, startups and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to assert that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and pastimes, leaving workers concerned with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
Via detailed stories and discussions, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are placed: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.
According to the author, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this phenomenon through the account of Jason, a deaf employee who decided to teach his colleagues about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of openness the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. Once staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a framework that praises your honesty but fails to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions count on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a manner of kinship: an offer for followers to lean in, to challenge, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in environments that demand thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives companies narrate about fairness and belonging, and to decline participation in rituals that maintain unfairness. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an declaration of self-respect in settings that typically reward obedience. It is a practice of principle rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not simply toss out “genuineness” completely: rather, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises readers to preserve the aspects of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and to relationships and workplaces where confidence, fairness and accountability make {
