How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Can Become a Snare for Employees of Color
In the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.
It emerges at a time of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very structures that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to argue that backing away from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and interests, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Identity
By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of assumptions are cast: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what comes out.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – a behavior of transparency the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges more manageable. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. When personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your transparency but fails to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is at once clear and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: an invitation for audience to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories companies narrate about equity and acceptance, and to decline engagement in rituals that sustain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in spaces that frequently reward conformity. It represents a habit of principle rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book avoids just eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes manipulation by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing genuineness as a directive to overshare or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey advises followers to keep the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to connections and offices where confidence, equity and accountability make {
