How ‘Authenticity’ at Work Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers

In the opening pages of the book Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: everyday advice to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a blend of memoir, research, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to redefine it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Self

Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to endure what comes out.

As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

The author shows this situation through the account of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to teach his team members about deaf culture and communication norms. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the organization often praises as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. After staff turnover erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your transparency but declines to formalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is both understandable and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: a call for audience to engage, to interrogate, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the effort of opposing uniformity in workplaces that demand thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts institutions describe about fairness and belonging, and to decline participation in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in spaces that often encourage compliance. It represents a habit of honesty rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. The book does not simply toss out “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. As opposed to treating sincerity as a mandate to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges audience to maintain the elements of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to give up on genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and workplaces where reliance, justice and accountability make {