Why ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Pitfall for People of Color
Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how companies take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The impetus for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of her work.
It lands at a period of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very structures that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a collection of appearances, peculiarities and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our own terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Identity
Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are placed: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the account of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to teach his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of candor the office often praises as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. Once personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a framework that celebrates your transparency but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an invitation for audience to engage, to question, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to question the accounts organizations narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to decline involvement in rituals that sustain unfairness. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of voluntary “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an declaration of self-respect in spaces that typically praise conformity. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that one’s humanity is not based on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not merely toss out “authenticity” entirely: instead, she urges its restoration. For Burey, authenticity is far from the raw display of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a principle that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges followers to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on genuineness but to relocate it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and organizations where trust, fairness and accountability make {
