Jodi-Ann Burey was only two weeks into her new role as an inclusion marketing manager for an outdoor retail company when she was accused of having a “race agenda.”
Burey, who is Black, was no stranger to workplace hypocrisy; as she sees it, the office is a petri dish where the knotty dynamics of society are concentrated. At the time of the accusation in February 2020, however, all she could do was laugh. “I was like, you knew who I was before you poached me. This is exactly what you wanted me to do,” she says over Zoom. A precursor to the racial reckoning that would follow the murder of George Floyd, the moment bore an important truth for Burey: Companies will feign interest in racial equity or gender parity but fail to deliver on those promises. “It’s so weird the ways that people will contort themselves to make you a willing participant in their lie.”
Today, race can feel like a liability in the job market more than it has in decades, as equity goals are being rolled back and the Trump administration has refashioned DEI into a dog whistle targeting Black people, trans people, and other minorities. In January, President Trump issued executive orders to scrub DEI from federal agencies and root out “illegal DEI” in the private sector. He has since worked to weaken antidiscrimination laws, and business leaders across the industry have swiftly complied. Combined with DOGE’s impact on federal agencies, consequences have been seismic. In August, according to the US Department of Labor, Black unemployment surged the highest it’s been since the pandemic in 2021.
Hiring has also slowed amid economic uncertainty, as people have expressed their frustrations on social media over a grueling job hunt. And as Gen Z faces greater hurdles to employment—the job market for “prime-age” laborers may be on a downward slope, the Economic Policy Institute noted—young people are being forced to reconsider their relationship to work altogether.
Burey’s new book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, is primed for a moment where people want to better understand how the workplace operates as they search for a place in it.
What Burey offers is a sobering look at the way companies take advantage of their workers, and how to reclaim what they lost. Through a mix of personal narrative and reporting, Burey cycles through accounts of burnout, corporate mismanagement, dwindling protections, and stagnant pay as evidence of the toll authenticity takes. “Authenticity costs, and I mean cash. Just existing as women means we are paid eighty cents for every dollar paid to a white man for the same role,” she writes. “We don’t need better ways to negotiate. We need a better system.”
With a career spanning nonprofits, education, and tech startups—companies only referred to in code in the book as “The Org,” “The Shop,” etc.—Burey maps the wreckage of 2020 when corporations rushed to performatively invest in DEI, but doesn’t stop there. She uses it as a springboard to widen the conversation about what is needed: “Can we imagine care rather than control?”
A book about the consequences of what it really means to be who you are in the office, hers is a story, in part, of how the American workplace failed—and continues to fail—its workers, and why a healthy work culture may be all but impossible.
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