Why Being Authentic at Work Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.
It lands at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
By means of colorful examples and discussions, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to survive what arises.
As Burey explains, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the defenses or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this situation through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the office often praises as “genuineness” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. After staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that applauds your honesty but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a snare when organizations rely on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a style of connection: a call for audience to engage, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that demand appreciation for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts companies tell about equity and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that sustain injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that frequently reward obedience. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Redefining Genuineness
She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not merely discard “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of character that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that opposes distortion by institutional demands. As opposed to viewing sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of candor, the author encourages readers to maintain the aspects of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and offices where confidence, fairness and answerability make {
