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Throughout the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author the author poses a challenge: everyday directives to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of memoir, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to employees who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the core of Authentic.

It arrives at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a set of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Persona

Via detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of anticipations are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what arises.

As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the organization often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After employee changes eliminated the informal knowledge Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of kinship: an invitation for followers to lean in, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories organizations describe about justice and belonging, and to reject engagement in rituals that sustain injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that often reward conformity. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that one’s humanity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not merely eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: instead, she calls for its restoration. In Burey’s view, genuineness is far from the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate harmony between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a honesty that resists manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than treating authenticity as a requirement to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises followers to maintain the aspects of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on genuineness but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and toward relationships and offices where reliance, justice and responsibility make {