Why ‘Authenticity’ at Work Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Burey issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, moving the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of her work.
It emerges at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: emotional work, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that improvement was unstable. When personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your openness but refuses to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is both lucid and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: an offer for readers to participate, to question, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to question the accounts organizations describe about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse engagement in customs that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of voluntary “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that typically praise compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just discard “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and personal behaviors – a principle that rejects alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to viewing sincerity as a directive to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and offices where reliance, fairness and accountability make {
