The Ways ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Pitfall for People of Color
In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: typical directives to “be yourself” 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 recollections, studies, cultural commentary and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Broader Context
The driving force for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of Authentic.
It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to argue that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; instead, we need to redefine it on our individual conditions.
Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Persona
Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people try too hard by striving to seem palatable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what arises.’
Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason
She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. Once employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a system that applauds your openness but refuses to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies count on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a style of solidarity: an offer for followers to lean in, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in settings that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to question the stories companies describe about fairness and belonging, and to refuse involvement in rituals that perpetuate inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that typically encourage compliance. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a way of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just eliminate “genuineness” entirely: rather, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not the raw display of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a principle that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges followers to keep the parts of it rooted in truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to give up on genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and toward interactions and offices where trust, equity and answerability make {
