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In the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker the author poses a challenge: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, research, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses co-opt identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Larger Setting

The motivation for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the core of the book.

It arrives at a moment of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are scaling back the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, peculiarities and interests, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Through detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of anticipations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the confidence to endure what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the story of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – an act of openness the organization often commends as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. When personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a framework that applauds your openness but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is at once lucid and poetic. She blends scholarly depth with a style of connection: an invitation for audience to engage, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To oppose, from her perspective, is to challenge the narratives organizations describe about justice and belonging, and to reject participation in practices that maintain inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of individual worth in settings that frequently praise compliance. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Authentic avoids just discard “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that resists alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to viewing authenticity as a mandate to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey advises readers to keep the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and answerability make {