A FARMÁCIA DO PASTOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: POLÍTICAS DO AMOR COMO GESTOS SANATIVOS DE FERIDAS RACIAIS

Abstract

The intellectual investment that I make in this research is in a discussion about the love policies of Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. The research is bibliographical, using the dialectical method to establish a qualitative and exploratory approach to the research corpus I selected, which consists of three books by the Reverend, namely: The Autobiography of Martin Luther King (2014); The Gift of Love (2020); and Why Can't We Wait (2020). I point out how the reverend's militancy is based on the prophetic and libertarian tradition of the American black church, which, in turn, was forged by Africans in the North American diaspora who began to confess the Christian faith, making recodings typical of the heterogeneity of Afro-diasporic identities. I think of the public personality of Pastor King from the triangulation of activist, poet and black prophet and inform how his ethical-philosophical and methodological choice for non-violent resistance in the civil rights movement of the African-American community is based theoretically and tactically, above all, in the satyagraha of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. Starting from a brief historical remission of direct actions of non-violent resistance by blacks in the United States, I seek to point out how non-violent resistance is feasible within black militancy. In view of the ambiguity and ambivalence of politics of love, I invest in a reading of such policies from the notion of phármakon (DERRIDA, 2005), trying to show how such policies, imbued with this pharmacological character, can mobilize a healing movement in our world racially fractured. I also try to point out that there is a black Brazilian church that, although drinking from the sources of the church and black American theology, needs to forge its own theology and public agenda, due to the challenges and endogenous peculiarities. Finally, I point to the irruption of a black insurgency within the Brazilian evangelical church, pointing out its possible contributions to the contemporary black movement. To epistemologically subsidize this research venture, I use, in an interdisciplinary braid, the theoretical contribution of several intellectuals from the fields of Theory of Literature, Cultural Criticism, Theology, Philosophy and Human, Political and Social Sciences. Considering the imperativeness of the vocalization of black subjects, in the face of the silencing to which they are socially subjected, which also occurs in the academic field, with its alleged neutrality, I speak, throughout the dissertation, in an essayistic way, in the first person.