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Throughout the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: everyday advice to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, research, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how companies co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

It lands at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a grouping of surface traits, peculiarities and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

By means of colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which self will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of appreciation. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the confidence to survive what arises.

According to the author, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of candor the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – temporarily made daily interactions easier. But as Burey shows, that improvement was unstable. Once staff turnover erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “Everything he taught left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself without protection: to face exposure in a structure that celebrates your openness but declines to codify it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions count on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is at once lucid and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to engage, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the narratives institutions tell about fairness and acceptance, and to decline involvement in practices that maintain injustice. It could involve calling out discrimination in a discussion, choosing not to participate of voluntary “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of personal dignity in spaces that typically praise compliance. It is a discipline of principle rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply discard “sincerity” wholesale: instead, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating authenticity as a requirement to reveal too much or adapt to cleansed standards of candor, Burey advises readers to preserve the aspects of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to shift it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and offices where trust, equity and answerability make {