The Ways the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
In the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a blend of memoir, research, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The motivation for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her background as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that backing away from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
By means of detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, disabled individuals – soon understand to adjust which persona will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of thankfulness. As the author states, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.
According to the author, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience
Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. Once staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that applauds your honesty but fails to codify it into procedure. 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 at once clear and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a tone of connection: an invitation for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about equity and belonging, and to refuse engagement in practices that maintain injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that often reward compliance. It is a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely eliminate “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the raw display of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional harmony between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects distortion by institutional demands. As opposed to treating authenticity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages readers to maintain the elements of it based on honesty, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the aim is not to discard authenticity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to interactions and workplaces where reliance, justice and answerability make {
