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Throughout the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Burey poses a challenge: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, studies, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how businesses co-opt identity, moving the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of the book.

It arrives at a time of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and many organizations are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Display of Self

Via detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to teach his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of candor the office often commends as “authenticity” – for a short time made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was precarious. When employee changes erased the informal knowledge Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What remained was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that praises your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations rely on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an invitation for readers to lean in, to interrogate, to disagree. According to the author, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories companies narrate about justice and belonging, and to reject involvement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that often praise compliance. It represents a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just discard “sincerity” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a principle that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than treating sincerity as a directive to overshare or conform to sterilized models of openness, Burey advises audience to keep the aspects of it based on sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into connections and organizations where confidence, justice and accountability make {