Why the Concept of Authenticity on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for People of Color

In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author raises a critical point: everyday injunctions to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, research, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the publication originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. The author steps into that arena to argue that backing away from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Self

Via vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but without the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this situation through the account of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was fragile. After personnel shifts eliminated the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a system that praises your honesty but fails to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies count on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is at once understandable and poetic. She combines academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: an invitation for audience to participate, to question, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that demand appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories companies narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to reject involvement in rituals that maintain injustice. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a discussion, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in settings that often encourage conformity. It constitutes a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Her work does not merely eliminate “genuineness” entirely: rather, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists alteration by institutional demands. As opposed to treating sincerity as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges audience to keep the elements of it rooted in sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and toward connections and offices where reliance, equity and responsibility make {