How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color
In the beginning sections of the book Authentic, author Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, investigation, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered change and reform. Burey delves into that landscape to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
Via vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to adjust which self will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of assumptions are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the reliance to endure what emerges.
As Burey explains, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to survive what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this situation through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the office often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was unstable. When staff turnover eliminated the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your honesty but declines to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a trap when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is at once understandable and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of connection: a call for audience to engage, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives institutions narrate about justice and inclusion, and to reject involvement in practices that sustain inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that frequently praise compliance. It is a practice of integrity rather than rebellion, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Authentic does not simply discard “genuineness” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than considering genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges followers to maintain the elements of it grounded in sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and offices where confidence, fairness and answerability make {
