In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, the writer Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: the commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, research, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.
The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.
It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are scaling back the very structures that once promised change and reform. Burey enters that terrain to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and hobbies, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.
Through vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers –people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are cast: emotional labor, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.
She illustrates this dynamic through the story of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – an act of openness the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was precarious. When staff turnover erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be asked to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your transparency but refuses to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.
Burey’s writing is at once lucid and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a tone of kinship: an invitation for readers to lean in, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in environments that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to question the stories institutions tell about fairness and belonging, and to decline participation in rituals that sustain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, opting out of unpaid “diversity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in spaces that often reward compliance. It is a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not conditional on institutional approval.
She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply toss out “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that resists distortion by institutional demands. Rather than treating authenticity as a mandate to overshare or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges readers to preserve the parts of it rooted in truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into relationships and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make genuine self-expression possible. Authenticity understood as a private, personal virtue is insufficient, she argues. Instead, authenticity must be collective, relational and structural. She advances the notion that we might reclaim agency – not by “performing identity better”, but by refusing complicity in the structures that exploit it.
Authentic argues that marginalized employees are routinely required to demonstrate exceptional competence while contending with tokenization. They are expected to shoulder a disproportionate “cultural tax”, stepping in to provide mutual support where institutions fall short, and to lead diversity initiatives without genuine decision-making authority or sufficient resources. When these initiatives are dismantled or defunded, silence is often imposed on these employees. In practice, their contributions are dismissed, access to senior leadership remains obstructed, and their basic accommodation needs or visible markers of difference become recurring points of contestation.
Burey grounds her claims in a diverse palette of voices, referencing thinkers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, and weaving cultural critique and scholarly insight. For example, Burey invokes Morrison to expose how institutions sustain inequity through endless dialogue rather than change. Quoting Morrison’s observation that racism functions as a “useful distraction” – forcing the marginalized to continually justify their existence – Burey situates the corporate workplace within that same dynamic.
Equally diverse are the sources she consults, which she states in her author’s note are people of color who she intentionally chose not to identify by race, although it is “a common journalistic practice to name the race for people of color, teaching readers to understand ‘white’ as the default.” The decision to omit racial descriptors to interviewee names, as well as focusing on the experiences of those who are often punished for showing up authentic, is Burey’s small attempt to reclaim these voices from the margins.
One of Burey’s victories is the clarity with which she reveals the inner workings of corporate illusion. She identifies the “authenticity playbook” that organizations deploy: expressive gestures (celebrating Juneteenth and honoring Martin Luther King Jr) layered over structural inaction (weak pay equity, racist performance reviews, stunted pathways for marginalized staff).
The stakes she conveys are not abstract. Marginalized workers are increasingly paying with their health and their dignity in the workplace. Burey writes that disability both reveals and destabilizes the fiction of fixed identity – anyone can become disabled, suddenly or slowly, and yet workplaces remain built on the presumption of permanence and sameness. Even showing up – requesting accommodations, asserting boundaries or moving through space differently – becomes a form of resistance. Burey underscores that ableism, like all systems of exclusion, extracts not only from those it marginalizes but also from the collective humanity of the workplace itself. To reclaim authenticity is not merely to “feel safe”, but to demand environments in which difference is structurally legible – and unequal burdens are dissolved, not outsourced.
Jodi-Ann Burey’s Authentic is not a comfort book. It is, rather, a reckoning: a mirror held to institutions that profit from the rhetoric of identity, and a hand extended to those who want to do work differently. It is at once personal and systemic, critical and hopeful. Though it may frustrate those seeking polished corporate manuals, it rewards readers willing to engage with discomfort, to interrogate the terms of belonging, and to imagine that a different culture of labor is possible.
If you care about how identity, power and work intersect, if you wonder whether the workplace you inhabit wants your full self or just the parts it deems safe, this book demands your attention. The myth of authentic self at work may be deep, but Burey shows us how to begin excavating a more just ground beneath it.
