Escaped from slavery, 1863, Culpeper, Virginia, "Contrabands" is the title given to the photo in 1880. Photo by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, Library of Congress

If you're going to create a nation, start with an origin story. In the late 1800s when German-speaking Austrians ruled their land, Czech intellectuals reached back to Slavic tribal legends, created a new national identity, and adorned it with rural folk motifs. By 1918 they were triumphantly launching the Czech Republic. In the 1960s Carlos Fonseca dug up the buried history of guerrilla general Augusto Sandino, who fought US Marines and the dictator they installed. Fonseca's revolutionary movement, the Sandinistas, went on to create a new Nicaragua. Origin stories are the battlefield where a people's political future starts being won or lost. The origin story of the US is a doozy. There was a Father of our Country and no mothers. Actually, we had many wise fathers who met in the City of Brotherly Love, inventing Independence and then a Constitution. All of them belonged to the white "race." However, the concept of classifying people by race barely existed a hundred years earlier. That is where The Cost of Privilege starts, in the 1600s as whiteness was being invented. In those early days, according to Smith, Africans in British North America were not fully enslaved. Like poor Europeans, they were indentured servants who could work out their terms of bondage to commercial farmers who were desperate for labor. It was common for indentured servants of both European and African ancestry "to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together" under "the harsh class oppression of the plantation elite." In 1676 Africans joined poor Europeans in an uprising against that elite and burned the government buildings in the capital of Virginia. Britain was slow in sending troops to put down the rebels, and Virginia's rulers saw that they needed their own way to control "a People where six parts of seven at least are Poor Endebted Discontented and Armed." Their solution was to divide the laboring class against itself by skin color and give every "white," no matter how poor, privileges that no black person could ever have. The rest is history. Ours. "[O]nce the white race came into existence," argues The Cost of Privilege, "Southern white workers never again rose up against the plantation system." The cost of privilege, then, is exploitation for everyone but the rulers. For many Africans, Latinos, Native, and Asian peoples the exploitation has been measured in genocide, land theft, violence, and impoverishment. For whites the cost is far less but still considerable. White workers' privileges keep them from joining forces with working people of other races and taking what they could. "White privilege is a curse on all working people," says this book, "but to get rid of it, white people will first have to recognize that it exists." Early in the 1970s the blue collar middle class hit the wall. After two decades of rising income, workers started losing their pensions, health care, raises, and jobs. Business was to blame: global competition and falling profits were pushing CEOs to break their postwar "social contract" with labor. But millions of white workers blamed blacks instead, and the New Right rose to power, using Nixon's infamous "Southern Strategy." Why did millions of Reagan Democrats eat up Reagan's Welfare Queen story: "The reason you're not getting ahead is Black women on welfare?" Why did so many white voters resonate with Senator Jesse Helms' racist 1990 commercial which featured a white man crumpling up an implied rejection letter, while the announcer intoned, "you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota."? It was because their sense of security was racialized to begin with, explains The Cost of Privilege. White workers knew the boss could fire them. But they also knew blacks would get fired before they did. When their jobs and wages started disappearing anyway, someone must have changed the rules. Getting rid of white privilege, patriarchy, and ruling class exploitation is The Cost of Privilege's aim. It looks at US movements that have tried to overcome them. It profiles whites who became "race traitors" and notes how few there have been. It names specific steps for people and organizations to take. It outlines a plan for revolution led by people of color and working class women with white male support. Full of passion and analysis, The Cost of Privilege has a flaw. It's so packed that little room remains to explain the history it reviews. The book works better for activists who have studied that history. Yet we need beginners' energy. We need people who will take this new origin story and build a better nation. Here is a guidebook.