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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical advice to “come as you are” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a blend of recollections, research, cultural commentary and conversations – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The motivation for the book stems partly in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the core of her work.

It arrives at a period of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and pastimes, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not an effective response; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Persona

Via vivid anecdotes and discussions, Burey shows how marginalized workers – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the trust to endure what emerges.

According to the author, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

The author shows this phenomenon through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who decided to educate his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His readiness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the office often applauds as “genuineness” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was precarious. After employee changes erased the casual awareness the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All the information went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to share personally absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your transparency but refuses to institutionalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when organizations rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is both understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a manner of solidarity: a call for followers to engage, to interrogate, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the effort of resisting conformity in environments that demand gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to challenge the stories organizations describe about fairness and inclusion, and to refuse participation in customs that sustain injustice. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “equity” labor, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in environments that frequently reward conformity. It represents a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book does not merely toss out “genuineness” completely: rather, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, authenticity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment typically applauds, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a honesty that rejects manipulation by corporate expectations. Instead of considering genuineness as a mandate to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of openness, Burey urges followers to preserve the elements of it based on truth-telling, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the objective is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and organizations where reliance, equity and answerability make {