MLK Day 2023 Theme
Where do we go from here? Where do we go from mass incarceration, voter suppression, police brutality, and a continued, exhaustive list of perpetuated injustices in this country and our communities? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who in his notable writing Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? stated that “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
What does love look like? What does love feel like? Historically, MLK Day at Concordia College has been a day of education and reflection; the MLK Day Planning Committee was drawn to the words of James Baldwin, “If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” If we are to love ourselves and love one another as a campus community, we must have an honest reflection of our biases, the harms we perpetuate, our commitments to repair harms, and our works toward racial justice in our local and global communities. To love ourselves is to question ourselves, as individuals and as a college.
With lives lost and more lives at stake, we know that to simply reflect with love is not enough. In her book “All About Love,” bell hooks challenges us to expand our understanding of love, to engage with love “as an act of will-namely, both an intention and action.” If we are to love ourselves and our communities, we must implement the demands of justice. We must act with urgency in addressing harms, meeting short-term needs, and implementing strategies to remove systemic, racial barriers at our own institution and beyond. We hope to see members of our community wrestling with an examination of current challenges at Concordia College and Fargo-Moorhead while identifying tangible action steps we need to take to address them.
As white supremacists continue to exert their hatred and delusion through public figures and policy, leading to an increase in violent acts, we must work to counter these with voices, policies, and paths forward of own — generated with love and liberation. In their Be Love campaign, the King Center calls us to create a beloved community by asking three critical questions: (1) Who must we be? (2) What must we do? (3) What are we to accomplish?
For many, it feels as if our country and our communities are in a period of overwhelming uncertainty, but we are not alone and need not be lost. We must listen and reflect upon the Black voices that have come before us and are still here — their work that has paved the way and has persisted. This year’s MLK Day Planning Committee was inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, bell hooks, and the King Center’s Be Love campaign — what will we as Concordia College do to be love, to implement the demands of justice? Reflecting on what we hope our community’s engagement looks during the day (and beyond), the MLK Day Planning Committee has selected “Generated by Love: Let our voices be heard and works be seen” as the theme for the 2023 MLK Day at Concordia College.