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Within the opening pages of the publication Authentic, writer the author issues a provocation: typical directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, research, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across retail corporations, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of the book.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Self

By means of detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which persona will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what arises.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to endure what arises.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this situation through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – a gesture of openness the organization often praises as “genuineness” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was fragile. Once personnel shifts erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your openness but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: a call for readers to engage, to interrogate, to oppose. For Burey, dissent at work is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts institutions describe about fairness and acceptance, and to decline engagement in customs that maintain injustice. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that typically encourage compliance. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “sincerity” entirely: instead, she urges its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is far from the raw display of personality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that opposes alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages followers to keep the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and offices where reliance, justice and accountability make {