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In the opening pages of the book Authentic, writer Burey poses a challenge: typical directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, cultural critique and discussions – seeks to unmask how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the responsibility of corporate reform on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the work lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, startups and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, leaving workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Display of Self

Via vivid anecdotes and discussions, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are cast: emotional labor, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.

As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the trust to survive what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the narrative of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to educate his team members about deaf culture and communication norms. His readiness to share his experience – a behavior of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made everyday communications more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was fragile. After personnel shifts wiped out the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your honesty but declines to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when companies rely on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is at once understandable and lyrical. She blends scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: a call for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, in her framing, is to challenge the stories organizations describe about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse participation in customs that perpetuate injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that typically encourage obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just discard “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is not the raw display of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a mandate to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey advises audience to keep the aspects of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and toward connections and organizations where reliance, fairness and responsibility make {