How Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, research, cultural commentary and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, moving the weight of organizational transformation on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The impetus for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in global development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and many organizations are reducing the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a set of appearances, quirks and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through detailed stories and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are projected: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what emerges.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this situation through the account of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of openness the organization often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. However, Burey points out, that progress was precarious. When staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your transparency but declines to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is simultaneously lucid and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a style of solidarity: an offer for readers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the stories companies narrate about fairness and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that often encourage conformity. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than rebellion, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not simply toss out “authenticity” entirely: rather, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between individual principles and one’s actions – an integrity that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges audience to maintain the elements of it grounded in honesty, self-awareness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and answerability make {
