Why ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for Minority Workers
Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, research, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across business retail, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.
It lands at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
Through detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem palatable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to endure what emerges.
As Burey explains, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the office often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was fragile. After staff turnover wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to formalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a trap when organizations depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an invitation for readers to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to question the narratives organizations narrate about equity and inclusion, and to refuse participation in practices that maintain inequity. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that often reward compliance. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Her work does not merely discard “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the raw display of character that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that resists alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating authenticity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and accountability make {