How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace May Transform Into a Snare for People of Color
Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: typical injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The motivation for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across retail corporations, startups and in worldwide progress, filtered through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.
It lands at a period of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that landscape to contend that retreating from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona
Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this situation through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the organization often praises as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. After employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a framework that applauds your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once understandable and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a manner of connection: an offer for followers to engage, to question, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in settings that expect thankfulness for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to interrogate the accounts institutions tell about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse involvement in practices that sustain unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in settings that frequently praise obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely eliminate “sincerity” completely: instead, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that resists manipulation by institutional demands. As opposed to considering genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges readers to keep the elements of it rooted in sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and toward interactions and organizations where trust, fairness and answerability make {
