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In the opening pages of the book Authentic, author Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of memoir, studies, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The impetus for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.

It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that arena to argue that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, quirks and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self

Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to survive what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to discuss his background – a behavior of transparency the organization often commends as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. Once staff turnover erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your transparency but fails to codify it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is both lucid and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a style of solidarity: a call for readers to engage, to interrogate, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of resisting conformity in settings that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives institutions narrate about justice and inclusion, and to reject involvement in practices that sustain unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in spaces that frequently encourage obedience. It is a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a method of insisting that one’s humanity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “authenticity” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is not the raw display of personality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional harmony between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to considering sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or conform to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges readers to keep the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to relationships and offices where trust, fairness and answerability make {