Why Being Authentic at Work Often Turns Into a Snare for Employees of Color
Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural critique and discussions – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform 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: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, filtered through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.
It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are reducing the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to contend that retreating from the language of authenticity – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead reinterpret it on our own terms.
Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self
By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what emerges.
‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the trust to survive what comes out.’
Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason
Burey demonstrates this situation through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the office often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. After staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that applauds your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations count on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
Burey’s writing is both clear and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: a call for readers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives institutions describe about justice and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that maintain injustice. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a meeting, withdrawing of unpaid “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that typically reward obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not simply discard “sincerity” completely: on the contrary, she urges its restoration. According to the author, sincerity is far from the raw display of personality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that resists distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering genuineness as a mandate to overshare or conform to sterilized models of candor, the author encourages audience to preserve the elements of it based on honesty, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to give up on genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and offices where reliance, equity and answerability make {
