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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Broader Context

The driving force for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of Authentic.

It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona

Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which persona will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of expectations are cast: emotional work, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to endure what comes out.

As Burey explains, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what arises.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of candor the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. Once employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be asked to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your openness but declines to institutionalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a snare when institutions rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is at once clear and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of kinship: an invitation for followers to lean in, to question, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, in her framing, is to question the accounts institutions describe about justice and inclusion, and to refuse involvement in practices that maintain inequity. It may appear as calling out discrimination in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of personal dignity in settings that often reward obedience. It is a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely toss out “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she calls for its restoration. According to the author, genuineness is far from the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more intentional alignment between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing sincerity as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sterilized models of openness, Burey advises followers to keep the parts of it rooted in sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and toward relationships and organizations where reliance, justice and responsibility make {