Why Being Authentic in the Workplace Can Become a Pitfall for People of Color
In the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, writer the author issues a provocation: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, studies, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are scaling back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the story of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to share his experience – an act of candor the workplace often praises as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After employee changes erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your openness but fails to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a manner of solidarity: an offer for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in environments that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the narratives institutions tell about justice and acceptance, and to reject engagement in customs that maintain unfairness. It could involve calling out discrimination in a discussion, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that typically praise obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a method of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. The book does not merely discard “authenticity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that opposes distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than considering sincerity as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges readers to preserve the aspects of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to move it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and workplaces where confidence, equity and responsibility make {
