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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: typical directives to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the burden of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the core of the book.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that landscape to argue that retreating from the language of authenticity – namely, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and interests, keeping workers concerned with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Through colorful examples and interviews, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to discuss his background – an act of openness the office often commends as “sincerity” – temporarily made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. After staff turnover erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is both clear and lyrical. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: an invitation for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that require appreciation for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to challenge the accounts organizations narrate about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse participation in customs that sustain injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that typically encourage compliance. It is a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids brittle binaries. The book does not merely toss out “genuineness” entirely: rather, she calls for its redefinition. For Burey, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more intentional correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects manipulation by institutional demands. Instead of treating genuineness as a mandate to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises readers to maintain the parts of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and workplaces where trust, justice and accountability make {