How ‘Authenticity’ in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Trap for People of Color
Throughout the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, writer Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: everyday injunctions to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Personal Journey and Wider Environment
The driving force for the publication stems partly in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.
It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that arena to contend that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.
Minority Staff and the Act of Persona
Through vivid anecdotes and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are placed: emotional work, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to survive what comes out.
According to the author, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to endure what arises.’
Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey
The author shows this dynamic through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to talk about his life – a gesture of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – for a short time made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was precarious. After employee changes erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your openness but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when companies rely on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Writing Style and Idea of Resistance
Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for followers to participate, to question, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in settings that demand appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, in her framing, is to question the narratives companies tell about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in spaces that often reward compliance. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely eliminate “authenticity” entirely: rather, she urges its restoration. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that resists manipulation by institutional demands. Instead of treating authenticity as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises readers to preserve the elements of it grounded in sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and offices where confidence, justice and accountability make {
