How ‘Authenticity’ on the Job Can Become a Snare for Minority Workers
Within the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – seeks to unmask how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.
Career Path and Larger Setting
The impetus for the work lies partially in the author’s professional path: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of Authentic.
It lands at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and hobbies, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Act of Self
Through detailed stories and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what emerges.
As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but without the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’
Case Study: Jason’s Experience
She illustrates this situation through the narrative of a worker, a deaf employee who chose to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. Once personnel shifts eliminated the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be told to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that applauds your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when organizations rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.
Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition
The author’s prose is at once lucid and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of solidarity: an invitation for readers to participate, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts institutions tell about justice and inclusion, and to reject participation in practices that maintain injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of voluntary “diversity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is offered to the company. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that frequently praise conformity. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not based on organizational acceptance.
Reclaiming Authenticity
The author also avoids inflexible opposites. The book avoids just discard “sincerity” entirely: instead, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than considering genuineness as a directive to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and organizations where confidence, equity and responsibility make {
