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In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author poses a challenge: typical directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of memoir, research, societal analysis and interviews – attempts to expose how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The impetus for the book originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of her work.

It lands at a moment of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to DEI initiatives mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, idiosyncrasies and interests, forcing workers preoccupied with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Display of Persona

Through detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by attempting to look agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which all manner of assumptions are projected: affective duties, disclosure and continuous act of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.

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

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this dynamic through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to educate his team members about deaf culture and communication norms. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of transparency the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was fragile. Once staff turnover erased the casual awareness he had established, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What remained was the exhaustion of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your honesty but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when organizations depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is simultaneously understandable and lyrical. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: a call for audience to lean in, to interrogate, to dissent. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the practice of opposing uniformity in environments that expect appreciation for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives companies narrate about equity and inclusion, and to decline involvement in customs that sustain inequity. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is made available to the institution. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of personal dignity in settings that typically praise conformity. It constitutes a habit of principle rather than rebellion, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids inflexible opposites. The book does not simply eliminate “authenticity” entirely: rather, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – an integrity that resists manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than considering genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of openness, Burey advises readers to preserve the aspects of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and offices where trust, justice and responsibility make {