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Within the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, writer Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The driving force for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a tension between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.

It lands at a period of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that earlier assured progress and development. Burey enters that arena to contend that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of appearances, quirks and hobbies, forcing workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self

By means of vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the defenses or the confidence to survive what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the trust to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this situation through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. After personnel shifts eliminated the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your honesty but declines to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is both lucid and poetic. She marries academic thoroughness with a style of connection: an invitation for audience to engage, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, in her framing, is to question the accounts institutions tell about equity and acceptance, and to decline participation in practices that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a discussion, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that often encourage compliance. It represents a discipline of principle rather than rebellion, a approach of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. For Burey, genuineness is far from the unfiltered performance of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – a honesty that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of treating genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to preserve the aspects of it grounded in honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward connections and offices where confidence, fairness and accountability make {