How the Concept of Authenticity on the Job Can Become a Snare for Employees of Color
Within the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of recollections, studies, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Larger Setting
The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of her work.
It emerges at a time of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from the language of authenticity – that is, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, keeping workers focused on handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona
By means of colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which various types of anticipations are placed: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to survive what comes out.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was unstable. After employee changes wiped out the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to formalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is at once clear and lyrical. She combines academic thoroughness with a style of kinship: a call for audience to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that demand thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to question the stories organizations narrate about fairness and acceptance, and to decline participation in rituals that perpetuate inequity. It might look like identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of personal dignity in settings that often praise compliance. It is a habit of principle rather than defiance, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Her work does not simply discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, authenticity is far from the raw display of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more intentional alignment between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a principle that opposes manipulation by institutional demands. As opposed to considering sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises audience to keep the elements of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and organizations where trust, fairness and accountability make {
