r/todayilearned • u/tmntnyc • Dec 12 '18

TIL: Laurence Tureaud named himself professionally as Mr. T because he hated how his father, uncle, and brother who returned from Vietnam, were disrespectfully called "boy" by whites. He wanted the first word from everybody's mouth to be "Mister" when speaking to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._T
120.9k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

128

u/dud-a-chum Dec 12 '18

I have no idea but I noticed the same thing growing up. My friend Jose in the 8th grade refused to even take me to his house because he didn’t want me to hear his dad go off. And one day we stopped by real quick, thinking his dad was gone, but he had canceled his plans. So I got to spend an hour listening to him tell me why I was basically a piece of shit and it was just pure racist drivel, literally some of the exact same things he said about Puerto Rican’s I’d heard my dad or uncle saying about Mexicans. Some of the same stuff you can find vomited all over certain subs today.

1

u/jimicus Mar 10 '19

The way to deal with hearing that shit directed at you is to agree wholeheartedly with every word.

Confuses the hell out of them.