The Ways the Concept of Authenticity on the Job Often Turns Into a Snare for Employees of Color
In the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a blend of recollections, research, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The motivation for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.
It lands at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are reducing the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a collection of surface traits, quirks and interests, forcing workers focused on handling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona
Via colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by attempting to look agreeable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the confidence to survive what arises.
According to the author, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to endure what comes out.’
Case Study: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that progress was precarious. After employee changes eliminated the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to expose oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your transparency but declines to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Literary Method and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is both lucid and expressive. She combines academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: a call for followers to engage, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in environments that demand appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts institutions describe about equity and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is offered to the company. Opposition, the author proposes, is an declaration of self-respect in settings that frequently reward obedience. It is a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just discard “sincerity” completely: on the contrary, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is far from the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a mandate to disclose excessively or conform to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages audience to keep the parts of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to move it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and workplaces where reliance, justice and answerability make {
