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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker the author poses a challenge: everyday advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, research, cultural commentary and conversations – attempts to expose how businesses take over individual identity, transferring the weight of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The impetus for the publication lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of her work.

It lands at a period of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. Burey enters that terrain to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reinterpret it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Display of Self

Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of anticipations are cast: affective duties, revealing details and ongoing display of appreciation. In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the trust to endure what arises.

According to the author, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to endure what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the organization often praises as “sincerity” – temporarily made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. When employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to face exposure in a framework that celebrates your openness but declines to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is at once lucid and poetic. She marries academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to lean in, to interrogate, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in settings that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to question the accounts organizations tell about fairness and inclusion, and to reject engagement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that frequently encourage conformity. It represents a habit of honesty rather than opposition, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses brittle binaries. The book does not simply eliminate “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, genuineness is far from the raw display of individuality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more intentional alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that opposes manipulation by corporate expectations. Rather than considering sincerity as a directive to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, the author encourages readers to keep the aspects of it rooted in sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to connections and organizations where confidence, justice and accountability make {