Pork Chop Liberalism

02 Jun, 2026

On May 30th I attended a concert at Shadle Park High School in Spokane put on by Spectrum Singers, a local LGBTQ+ choral organization affiliated with GALA Choruses, a national network of nearly 200 social justice choirs.¹ The show was called Good Trouble: Songs of Protest. Outside the auditorium doors, a kid had a table set up selling pride flags for ten dollars each. She told me if she sold ten she could get one for herself; her mom had bought one, and one other person had. I went inside wearing a Fred Hampton shirt.

The auditorium was full. I counted the room: over a hundred attendees, somewhere between two and five people of color in the crowd, two or three more in the choir itself. Seventy to eighty percent of the audience was elderly and white. Spokane is already 2.8% Black, one of the least racially diverse cities in Washington state, a fact with a documented history behind it.² The social justice choir had not meaningfully exceeded the city's ambient segregation. The people most implicated in the struggles the program was about to perform were not in the room. What was in the room was their aesthetic.

Spectrum Singers member Sara Duggin, 78, had told the Spokesman-Review four months earlier what drew her to the organization: "A social justice choir fills a spiritual need that I have right now with the state of our country and society so divided."³ She wasn't speaking metaphorically. The function she named, affective, spiritual, oriented toward a feeling of collective righteousness, is exactly what the event was designed to produce. I found a seat.

The program opened with a commissioned choral work called "Good Trouble," invoking John Lewis's phrase. Lewis brought it back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 1, 2020, at the 55th anniversary commemoration of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when state troopers beat unarmed marchers so badly they were hospitalized, when 26-year-old church deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson had already been shot by a state trooper for trying to protect his mother at a voting rights demonstration. The march was about police violence and the right to vote. Lewis was there. He had the skull fractures to prove it. When he died in July 2020, the phrase passed immediately into the progressive cultural mainstream: merchandise, Instagram captions, charitable foundations, concert titles. The distance between the Edmund Pettus Bridge and a ticketed show in a Spokane high school auditorium is the distance this article is about.

What followed was a program I want to read as a document, because documents reveal things their authors don't intend.

"For What It's Worth," introduced implicitly as antiwar protest. Stephen Stills wrote it in November 1966 about the Sunset Strip curfew riots: LAPD and the LA County Sheriff's Department cracking down on teenagers loitering outside the Pandora's Box club on a Saturday night. Stills said so himself.⁴ Its association with Vietnam is a retroactive misidentification so complete the song has been fully laundered into a different history: protest content assigned to a song about a local ordinance dispute. The selection criterion here is aesthetic: it sounds like protest. That distinction matters for everything that follows, because the same criterion was applied to every piece on the program.

"Bella ciao" was sung by Italian communist and socialist partisans killing fascists in occupied territory during World War II. The Communist Party led the largest partisan group, at least 50,000 fighters by the summer of 1944, drawing on years of underground organizing. By 1947 the song was performed at communist youth festivals in Prague under the banner of the World Federation of Democratic Youth.⁵ Its class origin is specific: armed communist resistance to fascism. It has since been commodified most visibly through Money Heist, a Netflix series about a heist, and arrived here in a concert hall arrangement with its partisan communist character fully extracted: the melody preserved, the politics laundered.

"Senzeni Na," What Have We Done?, is a South African anti-apartheid song that reached the height of its use in the 1980s, sung at funerals and demonstrations during a struggle that produced Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing, founded after the organization was banned in 1960 and denied every legal avenue for political change. Nelson Mandela was its first commander. The song was composed at a time when African literature was banned and possession of it in written form was a criminal offense. People carried it orally because they had no other choice. One version contains the line: Our sin is that we are Black.⁶ It was performed here by a choir that is overwhelmingly white, for an audience that is overwhelmingly white, in a city with a documented history of racial exclusion. The song's material origin, state violence, legal suppression, armed resistance, was present in the room as sound, stripped of everything that produced it. The question is never whether a song survives its original conditions. It is what the survival is made to serve.

"Songs for the People" uses words by Frances E.W. Harper, born 1825 in Baltimore to freed slaves, an abolitionist journalist and poet who spent her life in direct political agitation: anti-slavery organizing, Reconstruction-era civil rights work, women's suffrage. The specific poem selected is among her least politically explicit work, chosen presumably for its choral suitability. Her radical biography decorates the program. Her most neutral text is performed. "Gracias a la vida" runs the same operation: Violeta Parra was a Chilean communist who organized folk music as political education and died by suicide in 1967. The song chosen is a meditation on gratitude for sensory experience: light, sound, the alphabet. Her communism is recruited into the program's identity; her political practice is not.

The singalong selections reveal the ideological center most plainly. "Be the Change" and "We Walk in Love" are the participatory moments, pieces designed to generate maximum collective feeling through direct audience involvement. They are also the most politically vacuous pieces on the program. The harder material was performed at the audience. The soft liberal sentiment was performed with them. "Be the change you wish to see" is a Gandhi misattribution so thoroughly absorbed into NGO and nonprofit culture that it has lost even the individualist political content it once had. It is now purely affective, a feeling of purposeful virtue with no object. The audience sang it together. That was the political act the concert offered.

Two songs generated internal discord. Some singers refused to perform "The Flagmaker, 1775," a piece from Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World celebrating the founding mythology through the figure of a Revolutionary War flag-maker, and "Take Care of This House," from Leonard Bernstein's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a 1976 musical written in response to Nixon's re-election.⁷ The Bernstein piece is sung by Abigail Adams as a plea for stewardship of the White House. It is a song about caring for the American state's premier institutional symbol, written by a liberal who believed American institutions were worth preserving if properly tended. The performers who refused correctly identified the contradiction: these songs don't belong in a protest program. What the refusal also revealed is that the program's curator thought they did. That is the seam. An organization that includes Senzeni Na and "Take Care of This House" in the same program is not operating from a radical politics. It is operating from a liberal institutionalism: the belief that protest is legitimate grievance addressed to American democratic institutions, calling them to fulfill their founding promise. The flag and the house songs made that belief briefly, uncomfortably visible. The internal discord was the organization's own contradiction surfacing.

A speaker addressed the audience during the concert. Among the things we could do to fight back, they said, was vote. It was the only concrete mechanism named. For an event that had just performed music from armed partisan resistance, anti-apartheid struggle, and the abolitionist movement, the electoral outlet was not a tactical suggestion. It was the ceiling.

Huey Newton named this structure in 1968 in an interview with The Movement magazine. There are two kinds of nationalism, he said: revolutionary nationalism, which is dependent on a people's revolution with the end goal being the people in power, and cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism (pork chop nationalism, he called it) "is basically a problem of having the wrong political perspective. It seems to be a reaction instead of responding to political oppression." The cultural nationalist, in Newton's analysis, mistakes the performance of identity for the practice of politics. They return to cultural symbols, reclaim heritage, assert identity, and believe that assertion is itself a political act. Newton was unequivocal: "We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff."⁸

Newton was addressing a specific tendency in Black nationalist politics: organizations that prioritized cultural expression and identity reclamation over class analysis and material organizing. The Black Panther Party's answer was the Rainbow Coalition and the serve the people programs: free breakfast for 20,000 children nationally, health clinics, legal aid, political education. Material work accountable to the communities it served. The concert is the white PMC analog to what Newton was critiquing. The performance of social justice identity, the songs of other people's struggles, the aesthetic of solidarity, the collective feeling of resistance produced in a ticketed auditorium, substituted for the material practice of solidarity. Pork chop liberalism. The form of protest without its function.

Mao asked the clarifying question in 1942 at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art: literature and art for whom? The answer determines everything about what cultural work actually does. Mao was explicit that the answer has to be located in practice and action, not in stated intent: "In theory, or in words, no one in our ranks regards the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers as less important than the petty-bourgeois intellectuals. I am referring to practice, to action."⁹ Applied to the concert: in theory and in words, the program claims to serve social justice. In practice and in action, it produced an affective experience for a retired professional-managerial class audience in a city that couldn't generate a meaningfully integrated room. The raw material, Senzeni Na, Bella ciao, the abolitionist tradition, came from the masses. It was processed through the petty-bourgeois cultural institution and returned to the PMC as feeling. The mass line inverted.

Fanon examined what this inversion produces at scale. In The Wretched of the Earth, in the chapter "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," he described the class fraction that inherits the language and symbols of liberation after the colonial period and substitutes cultural performance for material transformation.¹⁰ This fraction speaks the vocabulary of the struggle, justice, solidarity, the people, while the actual conditions of the oppressed remain structurally unchanged. They do not suppress the liberation culture. They absorb it. They perform it. They consume it as identity and feeling, and in doing so they neutralize it more effectively than open suppression would, because the absorption looks like continuation. The songs are still being sung. The names are still being invoked. The struggle appears to be ongoing inside the concert hall while outside it the conditions that produced those songs persist undisturbed.

The concert wasn't performing the culture of a struggle its members belong to. It was performing the aestheticized version of other people's national liberation cultures, South African, Italian communist, Black American, extracted from their material contexts and consumed as feeling by a class fraction insulated from those conditions. The people for whom Senzeni Na was composed were not in the room. The people for whom it was being performed were.

Spectrum Singers is not an anomaly and the program was not a curatorial failure. Spectrum is one of nearly 200 nodes in the GALA Choruses network, a national organizational template founded on the premise that choral singing is itself a form of social activism. The mission statement: "leverage the liberating power of singing to create harmony and equity for all."¹¹ The mechanism by which singing leverages liberation is never specified, because it cannot be. The political neutralization is not a local accident. It is the standardized output of a national organizational form that has been producing it reliably across 200 chapters for decades. Logan Shevalier, Spectrum's artistic director, selects music that has "the right message, is vocally accessible, and is musically edifying."³ Political efficacy, accountability to affected communities, and relationship to active struggle are not among his stated criteria; within this organizational form, they are not the point. The point is the feeling. Duggin named it plainly. The form delivers it consistently.

On May 28th, two days before I sat in that auditorium, Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II were convicted on federal conspiracy charges in Spokane.

On June 11th, 2025, word spread through Spokane via a Facebook post from Ben Stuckart, former City Council President and legal guardian of a young man about to be taken by ICE. Hundreds of people showed up. The agents were transporting two men to the Tacoma detention facility: Cesar Alvarez Perez, detained on his 21st birthday at a routine ICE check-in, with Stuckart as his court-appointed guardian; and Joswar Rodriguez Torres, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who had entered the United States legally under humanitarian parole, a program the Trump administration had terminated. Both men had been subsequently found by a federal judge to have been unlawfully detained. Protesters sat in front of the bus and the transport van. Someone spray-painted the windshield. Someone let the air out of the tires. Someone slashed the tires of the van. Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla held the bus for nine hours.¹²

Who they are: Jac Archer, Co-Executive Director of Spokane Community Against Racism and a Gonzaga law student. Justice Forral, Spokane Human Rights Commissioner, former SCAR worker, a longtime organizer who had previously fought Border Patrol operations at the Spokane Intermodal Center. Bajun Mavalwalla II, Army National Guard veteran with a combat tour in Afghanistan, founder of a nonprofit that helped dozens of Afghan refugees escape the Taliban after the 2021 withdrawal. These are not outside agitators. They are people the city of Spokane had formally recognized, employed, and decorated. Until they did what they did on June 11th.¹²

I had met Forral months before any of this: a ride home after an event I can't fully place. At some point during the drive they asked me: "What does being a friend mean to you?"

The state would later answer that question with a federal indictment under 18 U.S.C. § 372, a Civil War-era conspiracy law. The former acting US Attorney for Eastern Washington, Richard Barker, called it "the first conspiracy prosecution in Eastern Washington history" under that statute, and resigned rather than sign the indictment. "I didn't feel in this case," he told PBS NewsHour, "that a conspiracy charge that would carry a six-year term of incarceration was true to who I was or who I wanted to be as a federal prosecutor."¹³ The jury was drawn mostly from people who don't live in Spokane. All three were found guilty. They face up to six years in prison and $250,000 in fines each.¹⁴

The day after June 11th, 2025, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors across the country to prioritize and publicize prosecutions of anti-ICE protesters. The Spokane case became the template. In the months that followed: the Spokane 9 charged on July 15th, the Broadview 6 in Illinois, over three dozen charged in Portland, dozens more in Minneapolis. The same DOJ simultaneously moved to dismiss conspiracy convictions against Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders from January 6th. Trump pardoned the rest.¹²

The concert program contained music from the South African anti-apartheid struggle, a movement the United States government officially designated as terrorist until 2008. It contained Italian communist partisan resistance to fascism, Black American spiritual tradition forged under slavery and Jim Crow, and the words of an abolitionist poet born into a country that considered her people property. Where the concert offered the ballot box as a safe channel to discharge affective political energy, the blockaded bus demanded the physical body as material friction against the kinetic machinery of the state. Every song on that program exists because people did what Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla did on June 11th: put their bodies between the state and the people the state was moving against, and accepted the consequences. Two days before the concert, three members of the Spokane community were convicted for providing that friction. Their names were not spoken. Their verdict was not mentioned. The concert's answer was vote.

Newton wrote in Revolutionary Suicide: "Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervor destroyed by mass media. They become Hollywood objects and lose identification with the real issues. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that."¹⁵

He was describing a specific process: the extraction of revolutionary content from revolutionary figures, the conversion of their images into progressive aesthetic objects, the replacement of their politics with their iconography. The process doesn't require intent. It requires only the right institutional conditions: a cultural form that produces feeling, a class fraction that consumes it, and a room insulated enough from material consequences that the distinction between the image and the politics it came from never has to be confronted. Those conditions were present on May 30th. The process was running on Bella ciao, on Senzeni Na, on We Shall Overcome, and on the image of Fred Hampton on my chest.

Hampton was 21 when the FBI coordinated his assassination with the Chicago Police Department. His chief of security was the paid COINTELPRO informant who provided the floor plans for the raid. Ballistics experts later determined that of the 100 bullets fired into his apartment, one came from inside.¹⁶ Hampton had built the Rainbow Coalition, Black Panthers, Young Lords, Young Patriots Organization, on the explicit class thesis that poverty and police brutality did not care about skin color, and neither should the people fighting back. Poor white Appalachian migrants, Puerto Rican organizers, and Black revolutionaries in coalition, running free breakfast programs for 20,000 children nationally, health clinics, legal aid, political education events. He was a Marxist-Leninist who had read Mao and Guevara and understood precisely what the state does to someone building multiracial working-class power from below. The FBI called it the neutralization of a potential messiah. They shot him while he slept.¹⁷ What Hampton was doing in 1969 and what Archer, Forral, and Mavalwalla were doing on June 11th, 2025 are not the same thing, but the state's response to both follows the same logic: identify the material threat, apply the legal instrument, remove the person.

Hampton also said this: "If you ever think about me, and you ain't gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don't want myself on your mind."¹⁸

I didn't realize what was happening to the shirt until after I left. That's the nature of the process Newton described; it doesn't announce itself. The room doesn't declare that it is neutralizing the image on your chest. It simply absorbs it into the ambient register of progressive identity, where Hampton's face sits alongside Bella ciao and Senzeni Na and "Be the Change" as one more signifier of righteous feeling. His assassination becomes aesthetic. His politics become décor. The feeling of solidarity is produced, aimed at the ballot box, and discharged. The room empties. Everyone goes home having participated in something that felt like resistance and accomplished the work of its opposite.

He refused this use of himself in advance. The shirt was the refusal. The room couldn't read it.

Outside, the kid was still at her table. Eight flags to go.

Notes

#accountability #mass line #media #method #organizing