“It’s in the lexicon, everybody talking but it’s our word now. And you can’t have it back.” – Ice Cube
On Friday Ice Cube went on Real Time With Bill Maher. This comes after the blowback from social media on Bill Maher’s language use, using terms that aren’t long forgotten but rarely ever used. He referenced himself as a “house nigger” in a joke and it was in extreme bad taste. Alongside Cube were activist Symone Sanders who served as national press secretary for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. Both Cube and Sanders were vocal on his show addressing what he said. There were valid points made, Cube addressed that the word is “Used as a weapon” and how “When I hear my homies say it, it don’t feel like venom. When I hear a white person saying it, it feels like that knife stabbing me, even if they don’t mean it.”
Symone piggybacked on what Cube said, agreeing adding, “You attempted to whitewash who was enslaved in the house. As a white person in America you would have been the master, the slave owner! …It was mostly black women who were enslaved in the house, who were raped, who were beaten daily, day in and day out…” Both Symone Sanders and Ice Cube intelligently addressed the issue and moved on. Maher has acknowledged his mistake and we all hope it doesn’t happen again.