How the Concept of Authenticity at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for Minority Workers
Within the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker the author issues a provocation: typical advice to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a blend of recollections, research, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of organizational transformation on to employees who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Broader Context
The driving force for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a time of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of appearances, quirks and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Through vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear palatable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are projected: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of appreciation. As the author states, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what arises.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the story of a worker, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of openness the organization often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was precarious. Once employee changes wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a framework that applauds your transparency but fails to codify it into policy. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions count on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is at once clear and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: an invitation for followers to participate, to question, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the effort of resisting conformity in environments that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts organizations narrate about equity and inclusion, and to reject engagement in customs that sustain unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in spaces that typically reward compliance. It represents a discipline of principle rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply toss out “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, genuineness is not the raw display of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a honesty that resists distortion by institutional demands. Instead of treating authenticity as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges followers to maintain the parts of it grounded in sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward interactions and workplaces where trust, justice and answerability make {
