How Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, transferring the burden of corporate reform on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.
Personal Journey and Larger Setting
The impetus for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.
It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Persona
By means of vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to survive what arises.
According to the author, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this dynamic through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. After employee changes eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once lucid and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an invitation for readers to lean in, to question, to disagree. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the narratives institutions tell about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in customs that sustain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that frequently encourage conformity. It is a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Her work avoids just toss out “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing authenticity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges audience to maintain the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward interactions and workplaces where trust, fairness and answerability make {
