Shattered

A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America. From a distance, Matthieu Chapmans life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two masters degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction. Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapmans own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack societylaying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapmans life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial Americaan important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.