Why ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, author Burey issues a provocation: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, research, cultural commentary and conversations – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, moving the burden of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The driving force for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in global development, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of Authentic.
It lands at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Display of Identity
By means of detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are placed: emotional work, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. When employee changes erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, 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 face exposure in a system that celebrates your openness but refuses to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is both clear and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that demand thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives organizations tell about equity and inclusion, and to reject engagement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It might look like identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is offered to the company. Opposition, the author proposes, is an declaration of personal dignity in spaces that typically reward conformity. It is a discipline of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not based on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just toss out “genuineness” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and one’s actions – an integrity that rejects distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of transparency, Burey advises followers to keep the aspects of it based on sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on genuineness but to move it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and to interactions and organizations where confidence, justice and accountability make {
