The Ways Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, author Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, studies, cultural critique and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.
It arrives at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Identity
Through colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are projected: emotional labor, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this phenomenon through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the organization often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. After staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your transparency but declines to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Burey’s writing is both understandable and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a style of solidarity: a call for followers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that demand thankfulness for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives organizations describe about equity and belonging, and to refuse involvement in customs that maintain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, opting out of voluntary “diversity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an declaration of individual worth in settings that frequently reward compliance. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply eliminate “authenticity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is far from the raw display of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than viewing genuineness as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages readers to preserve the aspects of it rooted in truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into interactions and organizations where reliance, equity and accountability make {
