How ‘Authenticity’ at Work May Transform Into a Trap for Employees of Color

Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, writer Burey issues a provocation: everyday injunctions to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of the book.

It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and many organizations are reducing the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey enters that arena to contend that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers focused on handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self

By means of colorful examples and interviews, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this situation through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His willingness to talk about his life – a gesture of transparency the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. Once personnel shifts eliminated the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be requested to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your openness but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an invitation for audience to engage, to interrogate, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in workplaces that demand appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, from her perspective, is to interrogate the stories organizations narrate about fairness and belonging, and to decline involvement in rituals that sustain injustice. It might look like naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that often praise compliance. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely eliminate “genuineness” entirely: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Rather than treating sincerity as a mandate to disclose excessively or conform to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages readers to maintain the aspects of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and offices where trust, fairness and answerability make {