The Ways the Concept of Authenticity in the Workplace Often Turns Into a Snare for Minority Workers
Throughout the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – seeks to unmask how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of corporate reform on to staff members who are often marginalized.
Career Path and Broader Context
The driving force for the book stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her experience as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the core of her work.
It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that arena to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.
Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona
By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.
‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what emerges.’
Case Study: An Employee’s Journey
She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to talk about his life – a gesture of candor the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. Once personnel shifts wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to face exposure in a system that praises your transparency but refuses to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.
Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance
The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and expressive. She combines scholarly depth with a style of connection: a call for audience to participate, to question, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the effort of opposing uniformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the stories companies describe about justice and inclusion, and to decline participation in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of unpaid “inclusion” labor, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Resistance, the author proposes, is an declaration of personal dignity in environments that often reward obedience. It is a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.
Redefining Genuineness
The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book does not merely eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. According to the author, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that opposes distortion by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or adapt to cleansed standards of openness, Burey advises readers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and offices where confidence, fairness and responsibility make {
