Why Being Authentic on the Job Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: typical advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies take over individual identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of Authentic.
It emerges at a period of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona
Through detailed stories and discussions, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but without the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.
According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this situation through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. After staff turnover erased the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a system that celebrates your openness but fails to formalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is at once lucid and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: a call for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to disagree. According to the author, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that demand appreciation for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts companies describe about equity and acceptance, and to decline engagement in customs that sustain injustice. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that typically reward obedience. It is a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Authentic avoids just eliminate “authenticity” completely: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between individual principles and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to viewing authenticity as a mandate to disclose excessively or adapt to sterilized models of transparency, Burey urges audience to preserve the parts of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and organizations where reliance, justice and responsibility make {
