ABSTRACT
When I grow up, I’d like to be like John R. Rickford. Or, more realistically, I’d like to help push forward some of John’s intellectual and political agendas as a linguist and activist for whom Black lives—in the Greater Caribbean and beyond—have always deeply mattered. Like John, I am a native Creole speaker—he from Guyana, I from Haiti. Like John, I went to UPenn—a few years after he graduated.
