How the Concept of Authenticity on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color

In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. This initial publication – a combination of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, moving the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The driving force for the work stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, startups and in global development, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.

It emerges at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as resistance to DEI initiatives grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and interests, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which persona will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are cast: emotional work, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what emerges.

As Burey explains, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to withstand what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to inform his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of candor the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. After staff turnover erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What remained was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be asked to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your transparency but fails to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions count on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an invitation for readers to lean in, to challenge, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, from her perspective, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about justice and acceptance, and to refuse involvement in practices that sustain inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “diversity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of personal dignity in environments that typically praise obedience. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “genuineness” entirely: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not the unrestricted expression of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing authenticity as a directive to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the parts of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and to relationships and workplaces where confidence, fairness and accountability make {