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In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, author Burey poses a challenge: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of recollections, studies, cultural critique and interviews – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, transferring the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The motivation for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across business retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.

It emerges at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to argue that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, peculiarities and pastimes, leaving workers focused on handling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Self

By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of assumptions are projected: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what emerges.

According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to withstand what arises.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and communication practices. His readiness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the organization often praises as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. Once staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a system that applauds your openness but declines to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies count on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is both lucid and lyrical. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for followers to participate, to interrogate, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in environments that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about fairness and inclusion, and to decline engagement in rituals that maintain injustice. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in settings that often praise conformity. It is a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a method of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Her work avoids just eliminate “sincerity” entirely: rather, she advocates for its redefinition. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not simply the raw display of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that opposes distortion by institutional demands. As opposed to treating sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges audience to keep the parts of it grounded in honesty, self-awareness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into interactions and workplaces where trust, fairness and answerability make {