Why ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for Employees of Color
In the opening pages of the book Authentic, author Burey raises a critical point: everyday injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of memoir, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how companies appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are scaling back the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self
By means of vivid anecdotes and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the trust to withstand what comes out.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
She illustrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His readiness to share his experience – a behavior of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was fragile. When personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that praises your honesty but refuses to formalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is both lucid and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: a call for followers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the narratives organizations narrate about justice and acceptance, and to reject participation in customs that maintain inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in spaces that frequently reward conformity. It represents a habit of honesty rather than rebellion, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not based on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just discard “sincerity” entirely: rather, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – a principle that opposes manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of transparency, Burey advises followers to maintain the parts of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. In her view, the aim is not to abandon sincerity but to relocate it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make {
