Why ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Can Become a Trap for Minority Workers
Within the beginning sections of the book Authentic, writer the author poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – attempts to expose how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The driving force for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across business retail, new companies and in global development, filtered through her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of Authentic.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very structures that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self
Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what comes out.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this dynamic through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. Once staff turnover erased the casual awareness the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is at once lucid and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: an offer for audience to lean in, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in environments that demand thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, according to her view, is to question the narratives organizations describe about justice and acceptance, and to reject involvement in customs that maintain unfairness. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a meeting, opting out of unpaid “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that frequently encourage conformity. It is a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Authentic avoids just discard “sincerity” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of transparency, the author encourages audience to maintain the aspects of it rooted in truth-telling, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and workplaces where trust, fairness and accountability make {
