How Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Pitfall for Minority Workers
Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: typical directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, studies, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
Professional Experience and Broader Context
The impetus for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.
It emerges at a time of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of aesthetics, quirks and interests, leaving workers focused on managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Display of Self
Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which self will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people overcompensate by striving to seem acceptable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.
According to the author, we are asked to share our identities – but without the protections or the trust to withstand what comes out.’
Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience
The author shows this dynamic through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of openness the office often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that progress was precarious. Once staff turnover erased the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be told to share personally absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your openness but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent
Burey’s writing is at once lucid and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: a call for followers to participate, to question, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the stories companies describe about justice and inclusion, and to decline engagement in rituals that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is offered to the company. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in settings that typically praise obedience. It represents a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.
Restoring Sincerity
She also refuses brittle binaries. The book does not simply discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey advises readers to preserve the parts of it grounded in sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to move it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and organizations where confidence, justice and answerability make {
