Why ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color

Within the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker the author issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a combination of memoir, research, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses co-opt identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Larger Setting

The driving force for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, new companies and in global development, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that arena to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers concerned with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self

Through detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, disclosure and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but without the protections or the reliance to withstand what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this situation through the account of Jason, a deaf employee who decided to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to expose oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a framework that celebrates your openness but declines to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a trap when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of connection: a call for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that demand thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the accounts organizations tell about equity and belonging, and to reject involvement in rituals that perpetuate inequity. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in settings that often praise compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just discard “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its reclamation. For Burey, genuineness is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists alteration by institutional demands. Rather than considering genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of candor, the author encourages followers to preserve the aspects of it grounded in honesty, individual consciousness and moral understanding. In her view, the aim is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make {