The Ways the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to staff members who are frequently at risk.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The driving force for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.
It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that arena to assert that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, quirks and interests, forcing workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona
Through detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of anticipations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
According to the author, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of candor the organization often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. After employee changes wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that praises your openness but refuses to formalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is both clear and poetic. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of solidarity: an invitation for readers to participate, to question, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that demand appreciation for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about equity and inclusion, and to refuse involvement in customs that sustain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is offered to the institution. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of self-respect in spaces that typically encourage compliance. It is a habit of honesty rather than defiance, a approach of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not based on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just toss out “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she calls for its restoration. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the raw display of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects manipulation by institutional demands. As opposed to considering authenticity as a directive to disclose excessively or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it rooted in honesty, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the aim is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to relationships and organizations where trust, fairness and responsibility make {
