Maya Angelou once said, “The N-word was created to divest people of their humanity. When I see a bottle [and] it says ‘P-O-I-S-O-N’ then I know [what it is]. The bottle is nothing, but the content is poison. If I pour that content into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.” This was Angelou’s response to those black people, like Ice Cube, who had reappropriated and assimilated the word. She appears to have thought that there was no softening or sanitizing or transmuting it, even for her own people.
