How Being Authentic on the Job Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
Within the beginning sections of the book Authentic, author Burey raises a critical point: typical directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The impetus for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of her work.
It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are scaling back the very structures that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to argue that backing away from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Self
Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to adjust which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what arises.
According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the narrative of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made routine exchanges smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. After employee changes erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to share personally without protection: to face exposure in a structure that applauds your openness but declines to institutionalize it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is both lucid and expressive. She combines scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in settings that demand gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the accounts organizations describe about fairness and belonging, and to reject involvement in practices that perpetuate injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that typically reward conformity. It is a habit of principle rather than defiance, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely toss out “sincerity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects alteration by corporate expectations. Rather than viewing authenticity as a mandate to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey advises readers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to interactions and workplaces where trust, justice and accountability make {
