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Throughout the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, speaker the author poses a challenge: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and interviews – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The driving force for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her background as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very frameworks that once promised transformation and improvement. The author steps into that landscape to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, peculiarities and hobbies, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Self

Through vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, employees with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the confidence to endure what comes out.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to share his experience – a gesture of candor the office often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications more manageable. However, Burey points out, that advancement was fragile. After employee changes erased the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your honesty but declines to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She marries scholarly depth with a style of connection: an offer for audience to lean in, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of rejecting sameness in environments that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to question the accounts companies tell about fairness and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in rituals that sustain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that often reward compliance. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not based on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not merely eliminate “sincerity” entirely: instead, she urges its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is far from the unrestricted expression of character that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that rejects distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than considering genuineness as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of openness, Burey advises followers to maintain the parts of it based on honesty, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to relocate it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to relationships and organizations where trust, equity and answerability make {