The Ways ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Can Become a Snare for Employees of Color
In the beginning sections of the book Authentic, writer the author poses a challenge: typical directives to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a blend of recollections, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Broader Context
The impetus for the book originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in global development, filtered through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.
It lands at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and many organizations are reducing the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Identity
Via colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, disabled individuals – soon understand to modulate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to endure what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this situation through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of openness the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was precarious. When employee changes erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your transparency but fails to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an invitation for followers to lean in, to question, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives companies describe about equity and inclusion, and to reject participation in customs that sustain unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of voluntary “equity” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that frequently reward obedience. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not simply toss out “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to preserve the aspects of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and toward interactions and organizations where reliance, fairness and accountability make {
