You have seen them before: busting a boastful swagger that makes you feel so uncool, their FUBU gear and bling-bling blinding you. They are self-anointed urban warriors. They spit slang so tactfully you’d think they practiced it in front a mirror for hours upon self-conscious hours. They probably did. Sliding into a Hummer (or at least a Ford Explorer), they ease into the leather interior, they roll past you and your friends, hollering epithets straight out of their high school football playbook.

You have seen them before. You may not know it, but they’re in the back of your 8 a.m. class, referring to each other by the “n-word,” trying to catch a reflection in the window and work on that half-anguished grimace that’s never quite perfect. Their fathers voted for Nixon, Reagan, the first Bush and the sequel. Their mothers own at least one biography deifying each respective first lady as a strong woman who also knew her place.

The new generation of right-wing Americans has many factions, but most fascinating and contradictory is the young conservative white man who co-opts hip-hop culture but doesn’t touch the politics. It is not remarkable that white people borrow and in some cases steal African-American culture per se (we’ve seen it before with blues, jazz and rock and roll). However, it is noteworthy that an art form so clearly created in a context of race and class consciousness has been adopted by some people because of their opposition to social change. These people are a new breed dealing with a new angst: a deep internalization of the “oppression of the majority,” fed to them in little bits and pieces by parents whispering about preferential treatment and political leaders passionately imploring misconstrued solutions of color-blindness. Playing the part so well, they demand an objective, sterile meritocracy in the name of fairness. They cry out in a familiar musical language of liberation, but the politics are drenched with irony.

It’s most evident in the success of Eminem’s whiny bigotry and Limp Bizkit’s simian backward-baseball cap rage, but it’s been building for years and years all around America: the feeling of emasculation and powerlessness in the face of growing tolerance (and government recognition) for racial and sexual minorities. The potential momentum of diminishing privilege is so horrifying, they must handle it by reinventing the language of their enemy as their own.

Concealing their celluloid scars behind song lyrics or an outfit, this new breed can safely recreate themselves as the underdog, as a people with a right to be outraged and make demands. It’s not “I’m Black and I’m Proud” by James Brown, it’s “Break Stuff” or “I’m An Ambiguously White and Marginalized Republican” (that might not be a real song, but I swear I hear it on the radio all the time). It’s a brilliant strategy, hijacking the thunder of marginalized peoples and using it against them, redefining the oppressed as selfish, needy and un-American.

This “strategy” is not necessarily a malicious calculation and the angst they feel isn’t necessarily fake. Regardless, the final product is always very powerful because it sells, whether it’s music, clothing or politics. We’ve all seen the vitriolic dinosaur (think Pat Buchanan) spew social conservatism: lazy affirmative action abusers and welfare queens, affordable housing as charity, homosexuals and women pushing a subversive agenda for material gain. But it’s so much more believable for the younger generations when emoted through a faux urban patois, backed up by piercing blue eyes that enter the consciousness of every young white male terrified of losing “their” America.

I, on the other hand, am only afraid of the influence those possessive young Americans will have on the future of the domestic and international sociopolitical condition. The once more blatant and obnoxious brand of exclusionary social conservatism automatically engendered angry counter-movements. Today the increasingly subtle, covert and subconscious concept of “ownership” has never borrowed this effectively from those outside of the club, both demobilizing opposition and empowering the status quo. Although not a conscientious political effort, the co-opting of hip-hop and minority cultures by white conservatives could be a harbinger of the future challenges towards social movements and their potential for political representation. Whether or not this happens, all I ask you is that in the meantime you conservative hip-hoppers put on a turtleneck or a jacket and tie and stop confusing me.