The Ways ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Often Turns Into a Trap for Employees of Color

In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author poses a challenge: everyday injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, research, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The motivation for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in global development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.

It lands at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that once promised change and reform. The author steps into that arena to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a collection of appearances, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Identity

Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, disabled individuals – soon understand to adjust which self will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. After employee changes wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your transparency but fails to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when institutions count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is both understandable and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: a call for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts institutions tell about equity and belonging, and to refuse participation in rituals that maintain injustice. It could involve calling out discrimination in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that often encourage conformity. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Reclaiming Authenticity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely discard “genuineness” entirely: rather, she urges its restoration. For Burey, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than considering sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages readers to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and workplaces where reliance, fairness and answerability make {