The Ways Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Snare for People of Color
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, shifting the weight of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Larger Setting
The impetus for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of Authentic.
It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should redefine it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Self
By means of detailed stories and discussions, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of appreciation. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.
As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this situation through the story of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What remained was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is simultaneously clear and poetic. She combines academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: an offer for followers to participate, to question, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in environments that demand appreciation for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to question the narratives companies narrate about equity and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an assertion of personal dignity in spaces that frequently reward compliance. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Authentic avoids just toss out “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is far from the raw display of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – a principle that opposes distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of candor, the author encourages followers to keep the elements of it based on honesty, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and workplaces where trust, equity and answerability make {
