The Ways ‘Authenticity’ at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for People of Color
In the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and conversations – attempts to expose how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of institutional change on to employees who are frequently at risk.
Professional Experience and Wider Environment
The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that arena to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Persona
By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what emerges.
According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to endure what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
Burey demonstrates this situation through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the workplace often praises as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. However, Burey points out, that progress was unstable. Once personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that applauds your openness but refuses to formalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to engage, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the narratives institutions tell about justice and belonging, and to reject engagement in rituals that maintain injustice. It could involve naming bias in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that frequently praise obedience. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than rebellion, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not based on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that resists manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey advises followers to keep the elements of it grounded in honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. In her view, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and toward connections and organizations where reliance, fairness and responsibility make {
