Why the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey raises a critical point: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they often become snares. Her first book – a blend of memoir, studies, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Broader Context
The impetus for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of the book.
It emerges at a moment of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a collection of appearances, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self
By means of vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which identity will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are projected: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to endure what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of candor the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was precarious. After employee changes erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your honesty but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when companies rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is at once understandable and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an invitation for audience to participate, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories companies describe about justice and inclusion, and to decline participation in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the company. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that frequently encourage compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just toss out “authenticity” completely: instead, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes alteration by corporate expectations. Instead of treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises readers to preserve the elements of it rooted in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and workplaces where reliance, fairness and answerability make {