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In the opening pages of the book Authentic, writer the author issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book stems partly in the author’s professional path: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.

It lands at a time of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that previously offered change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to contend that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Self

Through detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the trust to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what emerges.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

The author shows this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his colleagues about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the organization often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. However, Burey points out, that progress was precarious. After staff turnover erased the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to expose oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your honesty but fails to formalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies count on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for readers to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in settings that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the narratives organizations describe about equity and inclusion, and to decline involvement in rituals that sustain inequity. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is offered to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in spaces that often praise obedience. It represents a habit of integrity rather than rebellion, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not merely eliminate “authenticity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating authenticity as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, the author encourages audience to keep the aspects of it rooted in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into relationships and workplaces where trust, equity and accountability make {