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In the opening pages of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: everyday advice to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, research, societal analysis and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the burden of corporate reform on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The driving force for the work stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the core of the book.

It lands at a period of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that previously offered progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to contend that withdrawing from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of appearances, peculiarities and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

By means of detailed stories and interviews, Burey shows how marginalized workers – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which persona will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look agreeable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of assumptions are placed: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of thankfulness. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to endure what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a behavior of candor the office often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that progress was fragile. Once personnel shifts wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to face exposure in a framework that praises your honesty but refuses to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is at once understandable and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a tone of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to question, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To oppose, from her perspective, is to question the narratives organizations describe about justice and inclusion, and to reject involvement in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It may appear as naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s identity is made available to the company. Opposition, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that typically reward obedience. It is a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “authenticity” wholesale: rather, she calls for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the raw display of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and one’s actions – a honesty that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a directive to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages readers to maintain the elements of it rooted in honesty, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into interactions and organizations where reliance, justice and accountability make {