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Throughout the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a blend of memoir, studies, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how organizations appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are cutting back the very structures that earlier assured progress and development. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that retreating from the language of authenticity – that is, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; instead, we need to redefine it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona

By means of detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which self will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional work, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. As the author states, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the trust to withstand what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. Once staff turnover eliminated the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be told to expose oneself absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that applauds your transparency but declines to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is both lucid and poetic. She marries scholarly depth with a manner of solidarity: a call for readers to engage, to question, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for mere inclusion. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts institutions narrate about fairness and belonging, and to reject involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a meeting, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the company. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in spaces that frequently praise compliance. It is a practice of principle rather than defiance, a approach of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Her work avoids just toss out “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the raw display of individuality that business environment frequently praises, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that opposes manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than treating genuineness as a mandate to overshare or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges followers to maintain the elements of it rooted in truth-telling, personal insight and moral understanding. From her perspective, the objective is not to discard authenticity but to move it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into interactions and workplaces where reliance, fairness and answerability make {