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In the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author raises a critical point: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a combination of personal stories, studies, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, startups and in worldwide progress, filtered through her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of the book.

It emerges at a period of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Display of Identity

Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: emotional work, disclosure and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the trust to withstand what arises.

According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications easier. However, Burey points out, that advancement was unstable. Once personnel shifts eliminated the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a framework that celebrates your honesty but refuses to codify it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when companies count on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for followers to lean in, to question, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To resist, from her perspective, is to challenge the narratives organizations narrate about justice and inclusion, and to refuse engagement in rituals that perpetuate injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is offered to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that typically praise obedience. It is a practice of honesty rather than defiance, a way of insisting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. The book avoids just discard “genuineness” completely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of character that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a principle that resists alteration by institutional demands. As opposed to viewing sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages audience to preserve the parts of it rooted in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to give up on genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward connections and workplaces where trust, fairness and accountability make {