How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Snare for People of Color
Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker the author issues a provocation: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, research, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The motivation for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of her work.
It lands at a time of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as resistance to DEI initiatives grow, and many organizations are reducing the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that landscape to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, quirks and interests, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Identity
Through detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.
According to the author, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His willingness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. Once employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your honesty but declines to codify it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies rely on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is both clear and lyrical. She combines academic thoroughness with a style of kinship: an offer for audience to participate, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To oppose, in her framing, is to question the narratives companies describe about equity and acceptance, and to reject involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “inclusion” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that often praise conformity. It represents a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply discard “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional correspondence between personal beliefs and one’s actions – an integrity that resists distortion by organizational requirements. As opposed to viewing genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, the author encourages followers to keep the elements of it based on honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to move it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and responsibility make {
