🔗 Share this article

Throughout the opening pages of the book Authentic, author Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The impetus for the work stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in international development, filtered through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of Authentic.

It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to assert that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, peculiarities and hobbies, forcing workers focused on controlling how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona

Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – soon understand to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of assumptions are placed: emotional work, revealing details and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the reliance to endure what comes out.

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

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this phenomenon through the account of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – a gesture of transparency the workplace often commends as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was fragile. When personnel shifts erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a structure that praises your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is at once clear and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: a call for audience to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of opposing uniformity in environments that require gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives companies describe about equity and belonging, and to reject engagement in customs that sustain inequity. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is offered to the organization. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in settings that frequently encourage obedience. It constitutes a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply discard “authenticity” wholesale: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful harmony between individual principles and one’s actions – a honesty that opposes alteration by institutional demands. Rather than considering authenticity as a requirement to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises followers to maintain the elements of it based on sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the aim is not to give up on genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and organizations where confidence, fairness and accountability make {