How the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Can Become a Pitfall for People of Color
Throughout the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of recollections, studies, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The motivation for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that arena to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Identity
Through vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are cast: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.
According to the author, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to endure what arises.’
Case Study: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his team members about deaf culture and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. Once personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that applauds your openness but declines to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: an invitation for readers to engage, to question, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about justice and belonging, and to reject involvement in rituals that maintain inequity. It could involve calling out discrimination in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in environments that frequently praise compliance. It constitutes a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not merely toss out “sincerity” wholesale: instead, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges readers to keep the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and organizations where reliance, justice and accountability make {