How Being Authentic at Work May Transform Into a Snare for People of Color
Within the beginning sections of the book Authentic, author Burey raises a critical point: typical advice to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.
It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Act of Self
Through vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look acceptable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which various types of assumptions are projected: emotional work, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what comes out.
According to the author, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of candor the office often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. Once staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that praises your openness but refuses to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a trap when organizations count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and expressive. She combines intellectual rigor with a tone of kinship: a call for audience to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to question the accounts institutions narrate about equity and inclusion, and to reject engagement in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that frequently praise conformity. It is a habit of principle rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just discard “authenticity” completely: instead, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is far from the unfiltered performance of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists alteration by corporate expectations. Instead of considering sincerity as a mandate to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges readers to maintain the parts of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to relationships and offices where reliance, equity and accountability make {
