Pride and Privilege: challenging the myths of white America

On Octo­ber 20 2021, the infa­mous bronze stat­ue of defeat­ed Con­fed­er­ate Gen­er­al Robert E. Lee that once glow­ered from a mas­sive pil­lar loom­ing over Char­lottesville, Vir­ginia, met its log­i­cal end: the flames of a small foundry that reduced it to utter formlessness.

Near­ly a cen­tu­ry after the mon­u­ment to a trai­tor was erect­ed in 1924, the peo­ple brought it down — but the efforts to do so was not with­out con­se­quence. The deci­sion to remove the stat­ue sparked the 2017 Unite the Right ral­ly that result­ed in the mur­der of coun­ter­pro­test­er Heather Hey­er.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, the world descend­ed on Lee’s mon­u­ment once again. Vibrant mes­sages of lib­er­a­tion were scrawled in spray paint along the base while Lee’s trust steed was embla­zoned with bold let­ters pro­claim­ing ​“BLM.” At night pro­test­ers pro­ject­ed images of lib­er­a­tors and mar­tyrs like George Floyd, Trayvon Mar­tin, and Har­ri­et Tub­man on plinth, trans­form­ing the des­e­crat­ed mon­u­ment into a sym­bol of resis­tance and triumph.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er and pub­lish­er Kris Graves chose this moment for the cov­er of his new mono­graph, Priv­i­leged Medi­oc­rity (Mono­lith Editions/​Hatje Cantz). The book explores the Amer­i­can land­scape at the dawn of the 21^st cen­tu­ry, offer­ing a poet­ic medi­a­tion on the ways fas­cism and cap­i­tal­ism work hand in hand.

“We live in a soci­ety based on mon­ey and peo­ple hav­ing it, and we don’t real­ly talk about the suf­fer­ings of the have-nots when it’s in con­flict with the rich,” says Graves. ​“We don’t give land to the peo­ple we stole it from. Instead we’ve built fac­to­ries and win­dow­less box­es. We’re not try­ing to be a good place; we just live in a bull­shit world.”

Graves craft­ed Priv­i­leged Medi­oc­rity as a nuanced cri­tique, invit­ing read­ers to wade into places where still waters run deep. His ten­der pho­to­graph of tat­tered stuffed ani­mals left in the spot where Mike Brown was mur­dered by police offi­cer Dar­ren Wil­son in Fer­gu­son in 2014 stands as a silent indict­ment of Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments cat­a­logued in the sec­tion titled ​“A South­ern Horror”.

“The past is nev­er dead. It’s not even past,” South­ern nov­el­ist William Faulk­er famous­ly wrote in 1951, with the full knowl­edge America’s reck­on­ing has yet to come. The long shad­ows of the past cast a pall over our dai­ly lives, as evi­denced in Graves’s pho­tographs of insti­tu­tions like Robert E. Lee High School.

Graves recounts an encounter with a friend who rec­og­nized one of the Con­fed­er­ate mon­u­ments in the book. ​“It was down the street and he had to pass it every day on his way to school,” Graves says. ​“His par­ents told him to be care­ful because the white peo­ple in places like that are for the Con­fed­er­ate South. To be Black grow­ing up there was real­ly dif­fi­cult for him.”

Priv­i­leged Medi­oc­rity con­cludes with a ray of hope: the destruc­tion of mon­u­ments to trai­tors, slavers, col­o­niz­ers, and geno­ci­dal mani­acs who fol­lowed in the foot­steps of Christo­pher Colum­bus — a pow­er­ful reminder that, as Mal­colm X said, ​“Truth is on the side of the oppressed.”

Priv­i­leged Medi­oc­rity is out now

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