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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they’re traps. Her first book – a combination of recollections, studies, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how companies take over individual identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The motivation for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her perspective as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of the book.

It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey enters that arena to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, quirks and hobbies, leaving workers concerned with handling how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Display of Identity

Through colorful examples and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are cast: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the confidence to survive what emerges.

According to the author, workers are told to share our identities – but without the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this situation through the narrative of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to inform his team members about deaf culture and interaction standards. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the organization often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. When employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue 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 requested to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your openness but declines to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a snare when companies depend on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is at once lucid and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a tone of connection: a call for readers to participate, to challenge, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the practice of rejecting sameness in workplaces that demand thankfulness for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to question the stories companies tell about justice and acceptance, and to refuse engagement in rituals that maintain unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a discussion, withdrawing of uncompensated “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is made available to the institution. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of personal dignity in environments that typically praise obedience. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely toss out “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not the raw display of individuality that business environment often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists manipulation by corporate expectations. As opposed to viewing authenticity as a directive to disclose excessively or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges readers to preserve the elements of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and organizations where trust, equity and answerability make {