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Throughout the beginning sections of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, new companies and in global development, interpreted via her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that the author encounters – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of the book.

It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that arena to contend that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with controlling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our individual conditions.

Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Identity

By means of colorful examples and discussions, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, employees with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of anticipations are placed: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of gratitude. As the author states, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this phenomenon through the story of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to teach his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His eagerness to share his experience – a behavior of transparency the organization often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions more manageable. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. After personnel shifts wiped out the casual awareness he had established, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a framework that praises your transparency but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is both lucid and lyrical. She blends intellectual rigor with a tone of solidarity: an invitation for followers to participate, to question, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the stories companies tell about equity and belonging, and to decline participation in practices that sustain injustice. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, opting out of uncompensated “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that typically encourage compliance. It is a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work does not merely toss out “genuineness” entirely: rather, she urges its restoration. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unrestricted expression of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more intentional correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that resists manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of treating genuineness as a directive to overshare or conform to sterilized models of openness, the author encourages readers to maintain the parts of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and workplaces where trust, fairness and accountability make {