How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Trap for Employees of Color
Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of her work.
It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers focused on managing how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Persona
Through colorful examples and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by attempting to look palatable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: emotional work, disclosure and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but without the protections or the reliance to survive what arises.
According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – a gesture of openness the workplace often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was unstable. Once personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your transparency but declines to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Her literary style is at once lucid and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an invitation for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts organizations tell about justice and inclusion, and to refuse engagement in practices that perpetuate injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the institution. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in environments that often encourage conformity. It represents a habit of integrity rather than rebellion, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. The book does not merely discard “sincerity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects distortion by institutional demands. Rather than treating sincerity as a requirement to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages followers to preserve the parts of it grounded in honesty, self-awareness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into interactions and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make {
