Why Being Authentic at Work Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
In the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a combination of memoir, research, societal analysis and interviews – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The impetus for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.
It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that once promised change and reform. Burey enters that landscape to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of appearances, quirks and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Identity
By means of detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, disabled individuals – learn early on to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are projected: affective duties, revealing details and constant performance of thankfulness. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to endure what arises.
As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the organization often applauds as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was unstable. When staff turnover wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is at once lucid and lyrical. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an invitation for followers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of opposing uniformity in environments that expect thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to challenge the stories companies tell about justice and acceptance, and to reject involvement in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that often encourage conformity. It constitutes a habit of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book avoids just toss out “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is not the raw display of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes alteration by institutional demands. Instead of viewing genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adapt to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the parts of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. In her view, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and toward relationships and offices where confidence, equity and answerability make {