How the Concept of Authenticity at Work Can Become a Trap for Minority Workers
In the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, research, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Broader Context
The impetus for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, filtered through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It lands at a time of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that once promised change and reform. The author steps into that landscape to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona
Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to survive what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what arises.’
Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason
The author shows this situation through the narrative of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his team members about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the office often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be told to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is simultaneously clear and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a manner of kinship: a call for readers to participate, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in environments that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories companies describe about equity and acceptance, and to reject involvement in customs that maintain inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that often praise compliance. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “sincerity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the raw display of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between individual principles and personal behaviors – a principle that resists manipulation by organizational requirements. As opposed to viewing genuineness as a mandate to overshare or adapt to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages audience to keep the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to connections and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make {
