How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Throughout the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Burey raises a critical point: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a blend of memoir, studies, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to staff members who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Broader Context
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.
It emerges at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that landscape to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, quirks and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Identity
Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and continuous act of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what emerges.
As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to withstand what arises.’
Case Study: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was fragile. When employee changes wiped out the casual awareness the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies depend on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is at once clear and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: a call for followers to participate, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the stories organizations describe about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse involvement in customs that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that often praise obedience. It represents a discipline of principle rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not simply eliminate “authenticity” completely: rather, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, genuineness is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – a principle that resists distortion by institutional demands. Rather than treating sincerity as a mandate to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges followers to preserve the aspects of it rooted in sincerity, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward connections and workplaces where confidence, justice and accountability make {
