How Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Trap for People of Color
In the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of Authentic.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives mount, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that arena to contend that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – that is, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and hobbies, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Self
Via colorful examples and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look agreeable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of assumptions are projected: affective duties, revealing details and constant performance of thankfulness. As the author states, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this situation through the story of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was precarious. After employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your honesty but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
Burey’s writing is simultaneously lucid and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for readers to lean in, to question, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that demand thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts organizations narrate about justice and belonging, and to reject engagement in practices that sustain inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a gathering, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that frequently encourage compliance. It is a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Her work avoids just toss out “sincerity” wholesale: instead, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of personality that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – an integrity that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Rather than viewing sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges readers to keep the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. In her view, the aim is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and workplaces where reliance, fairness and answerability make {