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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Burey issues a provocation: commonplace directives to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, studies, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how companies appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the work stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, viewed through her experience as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of her work.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that once promised transformation and improvement. The author steps into that landscape to contend that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Self

Through vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are placed: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. According to Burey, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to endure what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the organization often applauds as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. However, Burey points out, that progress was unstable. Once employee changes wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be asked to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your openness but declines to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies count on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is both clear and poetic. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of connection: an offer for readers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that demand appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the accounts companies tell about equity and belonging, and to decline engagement in rituals that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that typically praise obedience. It represents a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a method of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just discard “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between individual principles and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges followers to preserve the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and offices where reliance, equity and answerability make {