The Ways Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of memoir, studies, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, moving the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.
It emerges at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Display of Self
Via detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, disabled individuals – soon understand to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of assumptions are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to endure what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this situation through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. 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. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was precarious. Once personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a framework that praises your openness but fails to institutionalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an invitation for followers to engage, to challenge, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to challenge the stories institutions tell about fairness and belonging, and to refuse participation in rituals that maintain unfairness. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that often praise conformity. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely toss out “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is not simply the raw display of personality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to considering authenticity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises readers to keep the elements of it based on sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and offices where reliance, fairness and answerability make {
