The Ways Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Snare for People of Color
In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The motivation for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, viewed through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.
It lands at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that previously offered progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to contend that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
By means of detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – soon understand to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the reliance to withstand what comes out.
According to the author, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this situation through the story of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to share his experience – an act of transparency the organization often praises as “sincerity” – temporarily made everyday communications more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. When staff turnover wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Concept of Dissent
The author’s prose is both lucid and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a manner of solidarity: an invitation for followers to lean in, to question, to disagree. According to the author, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that demand appreciation for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts institutions describe about equity and belonging, and to refuse engagement in practices that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of uncompensated “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an declaration of individual worth in environments that frequently praise obedience. It constitutes a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not merely discard “genuineness” completely: instead, she urges its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is far from the raw display of individuality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages audience to preserve the aspects of it rooted in honesty, self-awareness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and to connections and organizations where reliance, justice and responsibility make {
