🔗 Share this article

Within the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The driving force for the publication originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across retail corporations, startups and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that once promised change and reform. The author steps into that terrain to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of appearances, quirks and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; rather, we should redefine it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Display of Self

By means of detailed stories and discussions, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – learn early on to modulate which identity will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by working to appear palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to endure what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. After employee changes erased the casual awareness he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that praises your transparency but declines to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is simultaneously clear and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an offer for readers to engage, to challenge, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in settings that require thankfulness for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to question the stories institutions describe about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse engagement in practices that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that frequently reward conformity. It represents a habit of integrity rather than defiance, a method of insisting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely toss out “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that business environment frequently praises, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that rejects manipulation by organizational requirements. Instead of treating sincerity as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages audience to keep the elements of it grounded in honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to interactions and organizations where confidence, fairness and answerability make {