Mixing seemingly deadpan architectural portraiture with poetically frozen moments of daily life, photographer Kris Graves reveals the living history of racism and elitism in the United States.

In Privileged Mediocrity, Graves shows us both the brutality and beauty of American life. Each image of a person or a place tells its own complex, moving story and cumulatively captures a longing for the unfulfilled promise of a true democracy. Racism can be seen in infrastructure and planning nationwide, from the human and built environment impacts of redlining and unsustainable public housing, to spaces where homeless communities are able to only temporarily exist before they are dismantled.

This book seeks to explore the subtleties of the built realities and the planned experience across racial, class, and gender lines. It explores how racism, capitalism, and power have shaped the country and how that can be seen and experienced in everyday life.

"The myth had staying power. For decades it was almost inescapable -- told and retold in novels and history books, in classrooms and from pulpits, and in the new technology of Hollywood movies, such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. For many white Americans, it was also a convenient justification of the racial status quo of Jim Crow segregation. The myth was so much a part of everyday experience that most white Americans took it for granted, no matter how relentlessly African Americans challenged it."