The Ways ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace 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. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.
It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that previously offered change and reform. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of surface traits, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Persona
Through colorful examples and discussions, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are projected: emotional work, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what comes out.
‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to withstand what emerges.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of transparency the organization often commends as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be told to share personally lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.
Writing Style and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is at once lucid and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a manner of solidarity: a call for followers to engage, to question, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in environments that demand gratitude for simple belonging. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives companies tell about equity and inclusion, and to reject involvement in rituals that sustain inequity. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of personal dignity in spaces that frequently reward compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.
Restoring Sincerity
The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is far from the raw display of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that rejects alteration by institutional demands. As opposed to treating sincerity as a directive to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages followers to maintain the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the aim is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and workplaces where trust, equity and responsibility make {