How Being Authentic in the Workplace Can Become a Snare for Minority Workers
Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Wider Environment
The driving force for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very systems that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that arena to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, quirks and interests, forcing workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity
Via colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by attempting to look agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are projected: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.
According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what arises.’
Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason
The author shows this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – a gesture of openness the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. When employee changes eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What remained was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your transparency but refuses to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a snare when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
Her literary style is both clear and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an invitation for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to challenge the narratives organizations narrate about fairness and belonging, and to refuse participation in practices that maintain unfairness. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that often praise obedience. It constitutes a habit of honesty rather than defiance, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on corporate endorsement.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic avoids just discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists alteration by corporate expectations. Instead of considering sincerity as a directive to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges audience to preserve the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward relationships and offices where trust, fairness and answerability make {
