🔗 Share this article

In the initial chapters of the publication Authentic, speaker the author raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, shifting the responsibility of institutional change on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The impetus for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in global development, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of her work.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Self

Through colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

The author shows this situation through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and interaction standards. His readiness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the organization often praises as “sincerity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was unstable. After personnel shifts eliminated the informal knowledge Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your transparency but declines to codify it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is simultaneously clear and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: a call for audience to participate, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that require appreciation for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives institutions tell about justice and belonging, and to refuse involvement in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an assertion of personal dignity in environments that typically praise obedience. It constitutes a habit of honesty rather than rebellion, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely discard “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that opposes alteration by institutional demands. Rather than considering authenticity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises audience to maintain the aspects of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to abandon authenticity but to move it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into connections and organizations where reliance, equity and answerability make {