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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Burey raises a critical point: typical advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, research, cultural commentary and conversations – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The driving force for the book lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, leaving workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

By means of detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by attempting to look acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are placed: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this situation through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his colleagues about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the office often applauds as “sincerity” – temporarily made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was fragile. Once employee changes erased the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All the information departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that applauds your openness but refuses to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is both understandable and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: a call for followers to participate, to question, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that demand gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, according to her view, is to question the accounts companies tell about fairness and belonging, and to refuse engagement in customs that perpetuate inequity. It might look like identifying prejudice in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the company. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that often encourage compliance. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not based on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely eliminate “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unfiltered performance of character that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that rejects manipulation by institutional demands. Instead of treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges readers to preserve the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and workplaces where confidence, equity and accountability make {