Why ‘Authenticity’ on the Job May Transform Into a Snare for Employees of Color

In the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a mix of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how companies take over individual identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It emerges at a time of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are reducing the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Through colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how marginalized workers – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by attempting to look palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of expectations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the confidence to withstand what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this dynamic through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of candor the office often commends as “sincerity” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. When personnel shifts eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your openness but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies count on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is both understandable and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an invitation for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. According to the author, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in environments that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, in her framing, is to question the narratives organizations tell about fairness and inclusion, and to reject involvement in practices that perpetuate injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that often praise compliance. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply toss out “authenticity” completely: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Instead of treating authenticity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises audience to keep the elements of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and to relationships and workplaces where trust, fairness and accountability make {