How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace May Transform Into a Snare for People of Color

Throughout the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, research, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The impetus for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across corporate retail, startups and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that arena to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, leaving workers focused on handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Persona

Via vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this phenomenon through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the office often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was fragile. After employee changes eliminated the informal knowledge Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your transparency but fails to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is at once clear and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of solidarity: a call for followers to participate, to question, to disagree. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives companies narrate about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse involvement in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, withdrawing of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that typically reward conformity. It is a habit of honesty rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses brittle binaries. The book does not merely eliminate “genuineness” completely: instead, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is not simply the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more intentional correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that resists alteration by institutional demands. Rather than considering sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey advises readers to keep the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. In her view, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and to interactions and offices where reliance, justice and accountability make {