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Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, writer Burey raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The driving force for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, new companies and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of Authentic.

It arrives at a time of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are scaling back the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Persona

Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people overcompensate by striving to seem palatable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to endure what comes out.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of candor the office often commends as “sincerity” – temporarily made everyday communications more manageable. However, Burey points out, that advancement was precarious. After staff turnover erased the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that applauds your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She combines scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To dissent, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts institutions narrate about equity and inclusion, and to decline engagement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “equity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that frequently encourage obedience. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a way of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not merely eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is far from the unrestricted expression of character that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than viewing authenticity as a directive to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, the author encourages followers to keep the parts of it rooted in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to give up on genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and workplaces where reliance, equity and accountability make {