AceShowbiz -

Ice Cube had promised to confront Bill Maher when coming to his talk show on HBO, and he really did. The rapper put the "Real Time with Bill Maher" host on the hot seat over his blunder last week when he dropped N-word during a banter with Sen. Ben Sasse on his show.

"I want you to school me. I did a bad thing," Maher told his guests that included Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson. "For black folks, that word - I don't care who you are - has caused pain. I'm not here to do that. It doesn't matter that it wasn't said in malice; it wasn't. It brought back pain to people."

"We're all evolving. It was wrong and I own up to that. It happened, and it was wrong. People make mistakes, we're all sinners. I'm just a product of the country, but I don't want to pretend that this is more of a race thing than a comedian thing. We are trained to get a laugh. This is not the first time I've gotten in trouble, because that's what comedians are somehow wired to do. Sometimes we transgress a sensitivity point."

"I knew he was gonna f**k up sooner or later," Ice Cube quipped before adding, "What made you think that it was cool to say that?" After the host repeated his apology, the rapper said, "I accepted your apology, but I still think you need to get to the root of the psyche because I think there's a lot of guys out there who cross the line because they're a little too familiar, or they think they're too familiar. Or, guys that, you know, might have a black girlfriend or two that made them Kool-Aid every now and then, and then they think they can cross the line. And they can't. You know, it's a word that has been used against us. It's like a knife, man. You can use it as a weapon or you can use it as a tool."

"It's when you use it as a weapon against us, by white people, and we're not going to let that happened again. ... That's our word, and you can't have it back," he went on. "It's not cool because when I hear my homie say it, it don't feel like venom. When I hear a white person say it, it feel like that knife stabbing you even if they don't mean to."