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Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey poses a challenge: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a blend of recollections, studies, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to individual workers who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The motivation for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the core of her work.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that previously offered progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to contend that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers focused on managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Self

By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which persona will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what arises.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the narrative of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – an act of openness the office often commends as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. But as Burey shows, that progress was fragile. When employee changes erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when organizations depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is both understandable and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an offer for audience to lean in, to question, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that expect thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the accounts organizations narrate about fairness and belonging, and to reject engagement in practices that sustain unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a discussion, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” work, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that typically reward compliance. It is a habit of principle rather than opposition, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just toss out “sincerity” entirely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not simply the unfiltered performance of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between individual principles and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Instead of treating authenticity as a mandate to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages audience to maintain the elements of it rooted in honesty, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and to relationships and offices where reliance, equity and answerability make {