The Ways Being Authentic at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for People of Color
In the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a mix of memoir, studies, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It lands at a period of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are cutting back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to contend that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are placed: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to survive what comes out.
According to the author, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this situation through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to teach his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of openness the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was fragile. When personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What remained was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a framework that praises your transparency but refuses to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is both understandable and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of solidarity: an offer for audience to participate, to question, to disagree. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the practice of resisting conformity in settings that expect thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, in her framing, is to question the stories institutions narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse participation in customs that maintain inequity. It could involve naming bias in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that often praise obedience. It is a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just eliminate “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that opposes alteration by institutional demands. Instead of viewing genuineness as a requirement to overshare or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages readers to maintain the parts of it rooted in sincerity, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and offices where trust, justice and answerability make {
