Shattered

Seen from the outside, Matthieu Chapman's path looks like evidence that racial barriers are falling. He was the first in his family to attend college, went on to earn two master's degrees and a doctorate, and now works as a professor of theater. This memoir argues that none of these achievements has shielded him from antiblackness, which keeps surfacing in his daily life and in his encounters with others.

Rather than unfolding as a single linear story, the book is built from fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and gaps, a form that mirrors the fractured experience it describes. Chapman places his own life alongside the history of the United States and a structural account of race. Through this pairing, he shows what it means to live fully in a society that is demonstrably antiblack, and how that reality marks black bodies, minds, and ordinary days.

The episodes range widely, from his involvement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and his work within universities to a Loyal White Knights flyer left under his windshield wiper and a play with black students written by a black playwright. Across these moments, he traces the resistance, breaking, and rebuilding of the self that occurs when different ideas of blackness collide.

The book questions accounts that equate racial progress with a postracial nation. Its central claim is that systemic antiblack racism reaches every black person, however much they manage to accomplish.