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Within the beginning sections of the publication Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how companies take over individual identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across corporate retail, startups and in global development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey delves into that landscape to contend that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of appearances, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Identity

Via detailed stories and discussions, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of assumptions are cast: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the reliance to survive what comes out.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

The author shows this situation through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a behavior of candor the workplace often praises as “genuineness” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. Once personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that applauds your openness but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is simultaneously understandable and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an invitation for readers to participate, to question, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the accounts institutions narrate about equity and inclusion, and to decline engagement in rituals that sustain unfairness. It could involve calling out discrimination in a meeting, opting out of uncompensated “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an declaration of self-respect in settings that frequently reward compliance. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book avoids just eliminate “authenticity” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of character that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more intentional correspondence between individual principles and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges followers to maintain the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and organizations where trust, fairness and answerability make {