How Being Authentic at Work Can Become a Trap for Minority Workers

Throughout the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of memoir, investigation, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how organizations appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the work stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of the book.

It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that arena to assert that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona

Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a liability and people overcompensate by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are cast: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.

According to the author, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his colleagues about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the organization often praises as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. Once personnel shifts eliminated the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a tone of solidarity: an offer for followers to engage, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives companies describe about fairness and acceptance, and to reject participation in rituals that sustain injustice. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “inclusion” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is offered to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an declaration of self-respect in settings that often praise conformity. It constitutes a habit of honesty rather than defiance, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids inflexible opposites. The book does not merely eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: rather, she calls for its reclamation. For Burey, sincerity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that resists manipulation by organizational requirements. As opposed to viewing genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages readers to keep the aspects of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward connections and offices where confidence, equity and responsibility make {