Why Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Trap for People of Color
In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author poses a challenge: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses co-opt identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The motivation for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Act of Self
Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are cast: emotional work, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to survive what comes out.
According to the author, we are asked to share our identities – but without the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this situation through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of openness the office often applauds as “genuineness” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. When personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your transparency but declines to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is at once lucid and poetic. She marries academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: an invitation for followers to participate, to challenge, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts institutions describe about equity and belonging, and to reject engagement in practices that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “inclusion” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the company. Opposition, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that frequently encourage conformity. It represents a practice of principle rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Her work does not merely discard “authenticity” completely: instead, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, sincerity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional harmony between personal beliefs and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes alteration by corporate expectations. Instead of treating authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges followers to preserve the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and offices where reliance, fairness and answerability make {
