Why the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Trap for Minority Workers
In the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author issues a provocation: typical directives to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the burden of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The impetus for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that the author encounters – a push and pull between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Act of Identity
By means of detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which self will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are projected: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to endure what emerges.
As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this dynamic through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the office often applauds as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. When personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a structure that praises your openness but refuses to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is at once lucid and lyrical. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an offer for audience to lean in, to question, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that demand thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the stories companies tell about fairness and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that maintain inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “equity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is offered to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that typically encourage conformity. It is a habit of honesty rather than opposition, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply toss out “authenticity” completely: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, sincerity is far from the raw display of personality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that opposes manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than considering authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey advises audience to maintain the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and to connections and workplaces where trust, justice and accountability make {
