Why ‘Authenticity’ at Work May Transform Into a Snare for People of Color
Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – attempts to expose how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across business retail, new companies and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.
It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that previously offered change and reform. Burey enters that arena to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self
Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what arises.
As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of transparency the organization often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. However, Burey points out, that progress was unstable. After employee changes erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a snare when institutions count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is at once lucid and expressive. She combines academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: a call for readers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that expect thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts organizations describe about fairness and belonging, and to decline engagement in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “inclusion” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that often reward compliance. It constitutes a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Her work does not simply toss out “authenticity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not the unrestricted expression of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – a principle that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey advises readers to preserve the aspects of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to give up on genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to relationships and offices where trust, fairness and accountability make {