How Being Authentic at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for Minority Workers
Throughout the opening pages of the publication Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of general weariness with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that arena to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self
Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.
As Burey explains, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was fragile. When personnel shifts eliminated the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your honesty but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a style of connection: an invitation for readers to participate, to interrogate, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories companies narrate about justice and inclusion, and to decline involvement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that often encourage compliance. It is a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just toss out “authenticity” entirely: instead, she calls for its restoration. For Burey, authenticity is not the raw display of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that resists distortion by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or conform to cleansed standards of candor, Burey advises audience to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and offices where confidence, justice and responsibility make {
