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In the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, investigation, societal analysis and conversations – attempts to expose how companies co-opt identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The impetus for the work originates in part in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in international development, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the engine of the book.

It arrives at a time of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to DEI initiatives grow, and various institutions are scaling back the very systems that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers focused on managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Display of Self

Via colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the protections or the confidence to withstand what arises.

According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His readiness to share his experience – a behavior of transparency the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made everyday communications more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. Once employee changes wiped out the casual awareness the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to formalize it into procedure. Authenticity becomes a trap when companies rely on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

The author’s prose is both clear and lyrical. She blends intellectual rigor with a tone of solidarity: an offer for readers to engage, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that demand appreciation for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the stories organizations tell about justice and belonging, and to decline involvement in customs that maintain inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “equity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in environments that typically encourage compliance. It is a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she urges its restoration. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not the unfiltered performance of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists distortion by organizational requirements. As opposed to viewing genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of transparency, Burey advises followers to maintain the aspects of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward interactions and organizations where trust, fairness and responsibility make {