Shattered

<p><b>A heartrending and engrossing memoir that challenges narratives of racial progress and postracial America. <br> Every so often a book comes along that changes the way we see speak and think about the world. <i>Shattered</i> is one of those books. --Frank B. Wilderson III author of <i>Afropessimism</i> and <i>Incognegro</i></b> <p/> From a distance Matthieu Chapman's life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college he earns two master's 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. </p><p> Told through fragments facets shards slivers splinters and absences <i>Shattered</i> places Chapman's own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society--laying 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 Chapman's life story embodies the resistance that occurs the shattering collapsing and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. <i>Shattered</i> is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America--an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it. </p>