The Ways Being Authentic on the Job Can Become a Snare for Employees of Color

Throughout the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, research, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how businesses appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The impetus for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the core of Authentic.

It arrives at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that arena to assert that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, quirks and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Identity

By means of detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by attempting to look palatable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of anticipations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of appreciation. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.

According to the author, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to endure what comes out.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – a gesture of candor the office often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. After employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a framework that applauds your transparency but fails to codify it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when organizations count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is both understandable and expressive. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of solidarity: an offer for followers to engage, to question, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the stories organizations tell about justice and belonging, and to decline engagement in customs that maintain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a discussion, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in environments that typically reward compliance. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not merely toss out “sincerity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that resists distortion by institutional demands. Instead of treating sincerity as a directive to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of openness, the author encourages followers to keep the aspects of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and to interactions and offices where reliance, equity and answerability make {