Jan Brewer has effectively banned ethnic studies classes from Arizona public schools with HB2281.  (The law says that schools that have classes that promote resentment or a sense of solidarity among certain groups of students will lose 10% of their funding—but you can’t talk about what really happened in U.S. history without some groups of students feeling resentment and solidarity about it.)  The problem that minorities always face in public education is that the “education” system is used to reinforce what the majority wants to believe.  But recently some psychologists have found a solution:  Instead of talking about history in terms of good people and bad people, talk about it in terms of how people make decisions and how cultures develop, to show WHY people made different decisions in different situations and why their cultures developed differently.  I am a certified instructor, and there are a lot of teachers in my family, and in my family “minorities” will soon be in the majority, so we’ve known about this problem for a long time.

Here’s a map: http://www.asu.edu/map/interactive.  Parking at ASU sucks, so it’s best to take public transportation or carpool.

My spoken word show will be at ASU in the Memorial Union, 2nd floor, in the Gold Room (207) on Friday, Nov. 13th at 6 p.m..  It’s open to the public and admission is free for everyone.

There’s nowhere to park at ASU for free on a Friday at 5:30 in the afternoon, so take public transportation if you can.

Here’s a link to a mapquest map of ASU:  http://www.mapquest.com/maps?city=Arizona+State+University&state=AZ&country=US&latitude=33.419497&longitude=-111.932899&geocode=CITY

If that doesn’t work, you can just go to the campus and ask the first person you see where the Memorial Union is.

I’m going to be talking about science, education, and politics, the history and development of global environmental science,  and what it means for democracy, self-determination in general, global warming, globalization, the G-20 protests, immigration, the environment, militarism, and the resurgence of White Supremacism.   It’s part college lecture, part standup comedy, and part radical poetry.

If you can’t make it, check back here next week to see the video.