I wasn’t awakened and truly empowered as a black man in America until I started hanging out with the 5 Percent. That knowledge and experience provided the foundation for both the Wu-Tang Clan and my own manhood.
I would always see those brothers on the corner, talking positive and addressing issues in the community. The way they spoke and the terminology they used, I didn’t really understand it at first, but when I was around thirteen or fourteen, it drew me in:
“Peace, Allah. Come build with the brothers in the cipher.”
“The black man is God, don’t believe in no mystery God in the sky!”
“Peace, God. What’s today’s Mathematics?”
My name, U-God, came from my enlightener Dakim, the person who gave me knowledge of self. The U in my name is short for Universal. The word universal means multidimensional, infinite, comprehensive. Basically, anything I put my mind to, I will figure out how to get it done. I was given the Universal name because I carry the Ambassador torch every day. I can go anywhere, I can talk to anyone, it’s just who I am.
My full name is U-God Allah. The name U-God is a statement saying that inside of you, the all, the making of you is God. In our terminology, when we say God, it means being a supreme being. A supreme being’s seed/sperm is dominant. He can change the face of the earth physically.
Much of this comes from Islam and Muslim culture. Allah is the All Eye Seeing. Christians and Catholics believe that God is some mysterious force in the sky. We believe the black man is God, and Allah is the All Eye Seeing (Jehovah, God, etc.). The black man is the original man, the maker of civilization. How can you tell the originator what is what?
Knowledge of self is the terminology of 5 Percenters—5 Percent lessons taught blacks in America our true history and made us understand the reality of how we got in our current situation in America. Public schools and textbooks told us we were from Africa, were slaves for four hundred years, freed eventually by Abraham Lincoln, and further freed by Martin Luther King Jr. This is not our true history.
Our true black American history is contained within 120 Lessons, which were given to us by Clarence 13X, who was a contemporary of Malcolm X. The 120 Lessons teach us that we were stripped of our identity, broken down, and made to fear—and that fear was implanted in our babies, everything done to control us like cattle and property.
With this bit of knowledge that was given to us by Elijah Muhammad (who received it from Baby G, a half-black, half-white man who disappeared without a trace soon afterward) and Wallace Fard Muhammad before him, and a lot of very powerful Muslim guys who were awakened by some strange force, they passed that on to us as kids. The Muslim degrees that we received as kids are called the 120.
Clarence 13X brought these Lessons to the streets, gave them to us to wake us up. He was different because he brought Islam to the hustlers, pimps, drug dealers, and thieves on the street corners who needed it most. The 120 was for gangsters, pimps, all the street dwellers in the black community. You received these Lessons and became enlightened depending on the type of person you were.
The majority of the world is the 85 percent. They are the deaf, dumb, and blind masses, basically Savages in pursuit of happiness, who are often poison-animal eaters (certain foods, like pork, make a person docile, and added antibiotics and artificial ingredients just make it worse), who have no knowledge of self, and therefore are slaves to the 10 percent who are in power.
The 10 percent are the slave owners and bloodsuckers of the poor masses, like priests and politicians. They control the system; they know the truth, but keep it to themselves, so they hide the facts proving who the true and living God is.
Then you have the 5 Percent, who are the Poor Righteous Teachers. They’re trying to educate the 85 percent and awaken them out of their sleep state. Basically, the 5 Percent has to civilize the uncivilized. That makes up the entire 100 percent of the population on earth.
The 5 Percent Lessons taught you that everything in existence came from the black man, the Original Man, the father of civilization, God of the Universe. It’s a great source of pride and takes a lot of reflection because as a kid, you get bombarded by so much white America that you don’t know that blacks have contributed massive amounts of things to this world.
The 120 Lessons aren’t prejudiced against white people; the Lessons are for us. The 120 taught us to unlearn the lies that shackled us and replace that with genuine attempts to fill in history that was purposefully left out of history books. From birth, we’re bombarded with a single idea: that we were and are slaves. Our history is basically four hundred years of free labor. According to that version of history, we didn’t invent anything, we didn’t create anything, we were good for nothing else. So they took advantage of the place they put us in. They separated us. They fed us the wrong foods. And they keep us this way, with the trickery they use to do things. The 120 broke down everything.
Even at a young age, these degrees, the 120 Lessons, gave me and my crew our first real knowledge of self. You couldn’t trick us with stupid shit anymore. Why? Because the degrees told us about the tricknology, how we were taught lies and deceit. They allowed us to see the truth of our situation.
The degrees also gave us high self-esteem, allowing us to carry ourselves differently, with the idea that we mattered in this world. I think that’s a big problem with much of today’s youth, especially black youth; they feel like they don’t matter in today’s society. Granted, much of today’s society isn’t helping—it’s very clear to me that the deck is still stacked against young black men—but they have to rise above what society thinks of them in general and be true to themselves, hold their heads up high and keep doing what they’re doing every day, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
But mainstream society keeps trying to throw that shit in our face like we give a fuck anymore. I mean like, “Know your place, boy.” Naw, we don’t know anything about that. We black people don’t give a fuck about no place—what place you talkin’ about? All I know is that as long as I got some money in my pocket, I can do whatever the fuck I wanna do. And anyone trying to tell us otherwise just makes us go harder.
We need to realize that we’re standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before us. We’re the seed of the seed of the seed of those ancestors that made our history. All of us, we’re the best of the best right now. Those that made it, we survived everything that was thrown at us—diseases, plagues, violence, slaughter—to actually get to this level of humanity where we can actually read and write and chill on the couch and watch TV, do all the things we take for granted today.
We made it, we all survived to reach this point. But what comes next? What are you going to do with this life that your ancestors suffered and fought and bled and died for? How are you going to carry their legacy forward and leave your own mark—whether it be big or small—on the world? No matter what you choose to focus on, you should aspire to be the very best you can be, whether that’s being a drug dealer or a fireman or a teacher. If you want to be a poet, if you want to be a rapper, if you want to be an athlete, whatever you want to do, just always be striving for more—more skill, more knowledge, more experience—to be the best at it.
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When I was thirteen, my enlighteners were Dakim and Love God, who both dropped Supreme Mathematics into my lap. At the time, being 5 Percent was a big fucking deal. You had to know at least the basic Mathematics, or you were catching a beating. They never beat me because we were younger, and they were just happy the young Gods were picking up the lessons.
I got my degrees at fifteen. First came knowledge, which was just knowing the degrees. Then came wisdom, which was to be able to speak about the degrees. Finally came understanding, when the lightbulb came on and my world was forever changed—I was awake now.
Though Supreme Mathematics guided me through my teenage years, it really took hold of me when I got to about twenty-one years old. What really pulled me into it, the teachings of this offshoot of Islam, was that my last name is Hawkins. In case you don’t know, the first English slave trader was named John Hardy Hawkins. He was the first Englishman to bring slaves to America. He was sanctioned by the pope. The Roman Catholic Church gave him the okay to enslave us and bring us to North America. When I found that out, it blew my mind. That pulled me in. I wanted to know what this shit was about and why I shared that devil’s last name. Both my grandmother and I have tried to have our DNA analyzed, but the results have either been inconclusive or never came back.
The Mathematics encouraged me to learn how our families were split up and our history was stolen. How we were renamed after our masters. How we’re still doing the same shit to each other years and years down the line. How we need unity and structure to better our situation, but fall victim to the manipulative ways of the powers that be until we can’t stick together. We’re still attempting to bring down anybody who is doing better than us in our community, like crabs in a barrel. Still doing stupid shit the powers that be want us to do. My own kind will throw each other into slavery for profit and power. Still fighting and killing each other over stupid, petty shit. And this isn’t just a black thing, it’s a human condition. But black people are more direct about trying to fuck up your shit.
Worse yet, our lack of knowledge has us trying to drink from this one little well of drugs, entertainment, and sports. There’s so many ways to make money legitimately, but all we see is drugs, entertainment, and sports. See, that’s the thing about knowledge. When you get knowledge, you don’t even know you have it until you apply it. In essence, you don’t even have it until it gets used.
What it really all comes down to is knowledge of self: what you know—knowing your history and where you truly come from—how you know it, who you know. Listen to the people around you, observe the world around you. The average person in the hood isn’t seeing that; they’re just going by what they know and their limited worldview. But there’s more things under the sun than they can possibly imagine.
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The illest aspect of the degrees that I internalized was to not look in the sky for salvation. Religion is only a moral ceiling; you still have to live life as though there are repercussions for the shit you do, but I realized as a kid that I couldn’t rely on a mystery God.
People pray for things, then they think things are gonna come to them. Actually, that’s not the way it works. God helps those that help themselves, that’s basically what it means. You can’t wait for a mystery God to bring you food, clothes, and shelter. You’d be out there on the streets homeless. The act of doing, that’s where the blessing takes place.
And during the crack era of Park Hill, we needed to be reminded that we were the only ones who could save ourselves.