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Within the beginning sections of the book Authentic, author Burey raises a critical point: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the weight of organizational transformation on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Broader Context

The impetus for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of her work.

It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives mount, and many organizations are cutting back the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to contend that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, leaving workers focused on controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Self

Via vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the trust to withstand what emerges.

According to the author, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the trust to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who chose to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of openness the organization often praises as “genuineness” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. Once staff turnover erased the casual awareness he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that praises your openness but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is at once clear and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: an offer for followers to participate, to question, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that demand thankfulness for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts institutions describe about justice and inclusion, and to decline engagement in rituals that maintain injustice. It might look like naming bias in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “diversity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is made available to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that typically praise conformity. It represents a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a way of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely eliminate “authenticity” completely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate harmony between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that resists distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing authenticity as a directive to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of transparency, Burey urges followers to maintain the elements of it rooted in sincerity, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and workplaces where reliance, fairness and responsibility make {