Copper is the New Cotton. Have We Learned Anything from Slavery?

This has been great.

Thank you so much.

So we were just speaking about your boombox work.

And the thing that really caught my attention from the time I think we met on the street in Queens was that you focused on the pulp of sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco because reasons you've explained.

If we think about other really important commodities through time that have shaped societies, a lot of work has been done on this.

One of them was salt.

There were times in Africa, Europe, Asia, whatever now the Americas, where salt was a major, major commodity through history.

Gold, spices, other precious metals.

And we're back now in an era where many argue that We don't call them precious metals, but we call them critical minerals.

Critical minerals, rare earths, cobalt, copper, nickel, lithium, the actual rare earth elements, which are not rare, but they just have that name.

And they are things like dysprosium and ytterbium.

They're also metals, other minerals that are important.

And a lot of people have discussed about how important they are for technology, for electronics, for the phone, for the devices we're listening to and making this on, for iPads and for AI.

So my question finally to you with that long windup is what are the parallels or is this maybe not a great analogy between the use of the transaction and the exploitation that came around sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco and the modern metal situation? Do these situations rhyme? Are they on different axes? How do you compare and contrast those?

Yeah, I think those things are related as precious commodities that are, you know, essentially natural resources.

And that is somewhat what I had in mind, you know, as I developed the sugar cane and cotton and tobacco boombox sculptures.

And they're essentially monuments to some extent.

And that was part of why I wanted to create them in multiple continents around the world, specifically North America and the Caribbean, South America, Africa and Europe.

Now, it's not a direct correlation.

Right.

And this is where, you know, my expertise in international trade and economics and precious minerals and.

natural resources that become commodities.

This is where I am not an expert, but I'm more of a journalist in the sense that I'm collecting information that gives you more of a general overview and a general connection between these industries and these commodities at different points in time.

But I say that to say, What I'm looking at is where these resources that become these commodities that are the basis of these billion-dollar industries, where do they come from? Who are the populations and communities that have access to those resources through the land that they naturally inhabit? And then how are those resources being extracted for immense wealth that then goes to other communities in other parts of the globe? And- For me, that approach to extractive economics dates back to colonialism and specifically European colonialism of the Americas and Africa.

And this is where we see these extractive economics really take place.