The Ways ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color

In the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, studies, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how businesses co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The driving force for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.

It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that once promised progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to argue that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, quirks and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Through detailed stories and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the defenses or the reliance to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His readiness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often commends as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. When employee changes eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your honesty but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is at once lucid and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a manner of kinship: an offer for readers to lean in, to question, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the stories organizations tell about justice and belonging, and to refuse participation in rituals that sustain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that typically encourage obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Authentic avoids just eliminate “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that opposes manipulation by institutional demands. As opposed to considering sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and workplaces where reliance, equity and responsibility make {

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The Ways ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Employees of Color

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

Restoring Sincerity

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