International encyclopedia of the social - William A. Darity(1).pdf - enc of social - pillowbookworm

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

VOLUME 7

RABIN, YITZHAK–SOCIOLOGY, MICRO-

William A. Darity Jr.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

RABIN, YITZHAK

1922–1995

At a time when Israel’s global economic and political

prominence was on the rise, the nation’s prime minister,

Yitzhak Rabin, was tragically gunned down. The three

shots fired into Rabin’s back on the night of November 4,

1995, also pierced through a newly emerging Israel. As

Israel began to forge significant political bonds with its

Arab neighbors after years of territorial conflict, an Israeli

law student, Yigal Amir, assassinated Rabin out of reli-

gious conviction. Rabin’s premature death left questions

as to whether or not his objectives for a peaceful, econom-

ically strong Israel would be fully realized. This article dis-

cusses Rabin’s political and societal contributions to Israel,

his relationship with Palestine, and the impact of his

untimely death on Israeli politics and its relations with

Palestine.

During Rabin’s early years, Israel struggled for

national independence. Rabin was born in Jerusalem on

March 1, 1922. A little over twenty years later, Rabin

fought in the 1948 War of Independence, from which the

Jewish population in Palestine could claim Israel as an

official state. In 1968, Israel successfully fought against

Egypt, Syria, and Jordan during the Six Day War, in

which it gained control of the Gaza Strip, the Sinai

Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Not long after, Rabin entered politics with minimal

political experience. In 1974, the incumbent prime min-

ister, Golda Meir of the Israeli Labor Party, stepped down

after vociferous public calls for her resignation after Israel’s

failure in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Israel suffered a

large number of casualties and the loss of limited territory

in the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and Syria during this war.

Since Rabin was free from blame, he won the election for

prime minister and took the oath of office on June 3,

1974. He faced numerous challenges as a political leader

during a tumultuous time in Middle East history.

As prime minister from 1974 to 1977, Rabin con-

tributed greatly to Israel in both the domestic and inter-

national arenas. He strategically forged a closer

relationship with the White House and the U.S. State

Department, a process that began during his tenure as

Israeli Ambassador to the United States. This relationship

was made evident when Richard Nixon became the first

U.S. president to visit Israel. The visit was also a way for

Nixon to resurrect his falling public stature during the

Watergate trials, according to Rabin’s memoirs. This bond

became significant as Rabin sought and garnered U.S.

support for arms sales to Israel. Rabin also succeeded in

finalizing a 1975 interim agreement with Egypt, in which

Israel agreed to pull back from the Sinai Peninsula.

Rabin exhibited more skill in his second term as

prime minister, from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.

Israel and Palestine remained in conflict over the establish-

ment of Israel as a separate state. Yet Rabin and Yasser

Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation

Organization (PLO), signed the Declaration of Principles

(DOP), which aimed to terminate Israel’s occupation of

the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Jewish and Arab

leaders later signed the Oslo II agreement, in which Israel

agreed to withdraw from seven West Bank towns and the

Palestinians agreed to hold elections. The historically sig-

nificant cooperation between the two leaders created

opportunities for political and economic ties with the rest

of the Middle East and nonregional states.

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Race

The Arab-Israeli tensions resulted in divisions within

Israel itself. Rabin sought to resolve Israel’s conflicts with

its Arab neighbors, especially Palestine, through political

negotiation. However, some Jewish citizens such as Amir

felt betrayed by the Oslo II accords. Amir saw the agree-

ment as handing over land given to the Jews by God to

Palestine. He felt that what he perceived as betrayal could

only be rectified through murdering Rabin.

A focus on the free market contributed to Israel’s eco-

nomic growth. Israel’s economic policy shifted away from

socialist ideology towards a liberal economic policy, and in

the early 1990s Israel experienced an annual growth rate

of over 5.5 percent. At the same time, unemployment

dropped below 7 percent. Israel’s economic stability

attracted more foreign investment.

Ultimately, Rabin’s premature death had a long-last-

ing effect on Israel’s relationship with the rest of the

Middle East. Many years later, Israel still struggles with

questions of its identity, democratic order, the future of

occupied territories, and the chance for peace with

Palestine.

SEE ALSO Arab-Israeli War of 1967; Arafat, Yasir; Meir,

Golda; Nobel Peace Prize

skinned) groups began in the form of chattel slavery and

other abuses of humanity, those in power began turning to

science as a way to rationalize the oppressive conditions to

which these groups were consigned. The rush to develop

these pseudoscientific claims might have been spawned in

part by the need of the colonizers to assuage their guilt

and to resolve the cognitive dissonance and contradictions

evident in rising new societies that prided themselves on

freedom and democracy even as they relegated certain

groups in their societies to a nonfree, even subhuman sta-

tus (Horsman 1997). While the “science” that developed

the idea of race is certainly discredited by today’s stan-

dards, the social ramifications of humans having separated

themselves into races still remain firmly intact. As the

Thomas theorem once stated, “when men define situa-

tions as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas

and Thomas 1928, p. 572). Thus, although the idea of

race as a classification system of human beings is what

social scientists call socially constructed rather than bio-

logically based, it still is an enduring category of social

analysis. It is so not because of its genetic or biological

basis, but because of the power it has wielded as an idea to

create dividing lines between different classes of human

beings across the globe (Graves 2004).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Horovitz, David. 1996. Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of

Yitzhak Rabin . New York: New Market Press.

Kurzman, Dan. 1998. Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin .

New York: HarperCollins.

Peri, Yoram, ed. 2000. The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin .

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Rabin, Yitzhak. 1979. The Rabin Memoirs . Boston: Little,

Brown.

BEFORE RACE

Prior to the eighteenth century, human beings were recog-

nizing differences between themselves as they crossed

national and continental borders in exploration and trade.

Sometimes these differences would be reflected upon pos-

itively and at others, negatively, especially when groups

clashed over territory and power. For example, there are

Biblical writings where African kingdoms and Jewish

kingdoms are regarded as allies of generally equal worth

and status. And in Greek and Roman periods, these two

societies expressed a great respect for the learning they

gleaned from African cultural developments. Even as

occasional negative images of blackness (associated with

sin, devil, and non-Christianity) were expressed, “these

views were never developed into a broad color conscious-

ness viewing Africans as a greatly inferior species” (Feagin

2000, p. 71). Thus, although human beings reflected

upon their own differences as they made contact with

each other throughout time, there was generally a mix of

negative and positive imagery, and prior to the idea of

race, no discussion of an altogether inferior or superior

species attached to physical differences yet existed.

From the 1400s to the 1600s, as colonization and

enslavement expanded, the Spanish and other Europeans

began to use consistently negative language to describe the

African human beings they enslaved. This pattern was

coupled with positive evaluations of their own group.

However, these evaluations still did not amount to explic-

Sarita D. Jackson

RACE

The concept of race as a categorization system for human

beings did not exist formally until the late eighteenth cen-

tury. Most analysts (e.g., Feagin and Feagin 1999; Allen

1994; Roediger 1991; Omi and Winant 1994) have

linked the inception of the biologically based idea of dis-

tinct races of human beings to European colonization of

the New World. Although prior to this time human

beings certainly distinguished between themselves in

many ways, these distinctions tended to be based upon

tribal, clan, ethnic, or national differences that stemmed

from place of residence/territory or shared belief systems

rather than on innate, genetic characteristics. However, as

capitalist-based exploitation of certain (often darker-

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Race

itly racial designations. The Europeans’ negative assess-

ments of Africans at this point were rooted in cultural and

religious differences rather than in any biological,

unchanging facts of their physical chemistry. For instance,

Europeans described themselves as rational and civilized

while they described Africans as uncivilized and uncon-

trolled. Further, the Africans not being Christian resulted

in Europeans characterizing them as “heathens,” and later

in North America, European settlers used the same line of

thinking toward the Native Americans (Feagin 2000;

Takaki 1993). In fact, in the 1600s, a European named

François Bernier (1625–1688) even developed a hierarchy

of groups ranking them from the most primitive and civ-

ilized to the least, placing Europeans at the top and

Africans at the bottom (Feagin and Feagin 1999).

However ethnocentric and biased these claims were,

they were based upon the assumption that these were cul-

tural differences emanating from shared, learned beliefs

rather than body composition or other unchangeable bio-

logical inheritances. Indeed, in the case of the Native

Americans, for a brief time, the colonists in power consid-

ered the possibility that Native Americans could be civi-

lized and thus considered equal by converting them to

Christianity (Takaki 1993). These positions acknowledg-

ing a common human capacity for acquiring knowledge

across all skin color gradations (even as it was perceived as

underutilized or underdeveloped for some) still ran

counter to later notions of biologically grounded races.

The language of race as a pseudobiological category

of humans emerged first in the 1770s with the German

philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). As noted by

Emmanuel C. Eze in his 1997 publication, Kant’s catego-

rization hierarchy for “races of mankind” was laid out as

follows:

Stem genus, white brunette;

First race, very blond (northern Europe), of damp

cold;

Second race, copper-red (America), of dry cold;

Third race, black (Senegambia), of dry heat;

Fourth race, olive-yellow (Indians), of dry heat.

Roughly two decades later, another German scholar

(of human anatomy) named Johann Blumenbach

(1752–1840) ventured into similar territory of racial hier-

archies founded on what he viewed as biological premises.

Ivan Hannaford noted in his 1996 work that

Blumenbach’s categories were conceptualized in the fol-

lowing order (top to bottom; superior to inferior):

Caucasians (Europeans)

Mongolians (Asians)

Ethiopians (Africans)

Americans (Native Americans)

Malays (Polynesians)

RACE AS IDEOLOGY AND SOCIAL

RELATIONSHIP

Several scholars have identified the conception of human

races as a key part of the development of a racist ideology

(e.g., Feagin 2000; Yetman 2004). An ideology is a belief

system intended to rationalize and justify existing social

arrangements. In this way the concept of race is a deci-

sively social concept because it is not observed as existing

independent of the “racialized social systems” (Bonilla-

Silva 1997) that hold it in place. Feagin identifies three

dynamics that crystallized by the late 1700s to result in a

clearly racist (as opposed to nationalist or cultural) ideol-

ogy: “(1) an accent on physically and biologically distinc-

tive categories called ‘races’; (2) an emphasis on ‘race’ as

the primary determinant of a group’s essential personality

and cultural traits; and (3) a hierarchy of superior and

inferior racial groups” (Feagin 2000, p. 79). Thus, at this

point in history, no longer are human differences attrib-

uted first and foremost to national, regional, and cultural

variations. Instead, they become perceived in a biologi-

cally determined (static, unchanging) way, and the differ-

ences begin to be encoded into hierarchical categorization

schemas that connote superior and inferior species of

human beings.

Blumenbach was the one who coined the term

Caucasian simply because he felt the Europeans he

observed in the Caucasus mountains were the most beau-

tiful, and he erroneously concluded that the first human

remains were found there (Gould 1994). Yet the power of

this pseudoscience remains in contemporary conscious-

ness, as some modern-day Americans who view them-

selves as white, for example, refer to themselves as

Caucasian, even when their genealogy hails from nowhere

near the Caucasus mountains from which this category

got its name. It is work like this that laid the groundwork

for the centuries that followed, with human beings across

the globe viewing themselves as members of distinct racial

groups. These groupings were never just nominal cate-

gories; they were always hierarchically arranged and struc-

tured by dominance (Hall 1980).

An important point to note about these racial cate-

gories is that they did not just come to have meaning sim-

ply because a couple of scholars penned these

categorizations systems and they attained popularity. They

were reified because racialized social systems were struc-

tured around them. That is, the social relations of the day

mirrored the order that the categories suggested. They

would not have acquired such powerful social meaning

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

International encyclopedia of the social - William A. Darity(1).pdf

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