ABSTRACT
The United States has a long history of just this sort of unequal treatment of social groups, especially racial minorities. Government has historically tried to address this sort of inequality through affirmative action, or actions designed to help minorities overcome the effects of past discrimination and compete on an equal basis with the majority. Civil rights are the rights of all citizens to legal, social, and economic equality. African Americans are not the only group to wage an extended battle over the federal government’s duty to prevent their freedoms from being arbitrarily denied. Slavery systematically denied civil rights to large numbers of African Americans for almost the entire first century of the republic’s history. The end of the Civil War brought with it a constitutional ban on slavery. The application of evolutionary and biological theories is a relatively recent and novel scientific approach to studying politics and policy.
