Daily Mail
April 8, 2014
Jay-Z raised eyebrows at the Barclay’s Center last week when he wore a medallion symbolizing the Five Percent Nation.
The Brooklyn-born rapper was sitting court-side at a Nets game on Tuesday with wife Beyonce when he was snapped wearing the controversial symbol.
One of the core tenants of the Five Percent Nation – an off-shoot of the Nation of Islam – is that white people are ‘wicked and inferior’ to black men.
When asked by a reporter whether the medallion is meaningful to him, Jay-Z shrugged and said ‘A little bit’.
This isn’t the first time that the rapper has been connected to the Five-Percenters.
He was photographed wearing another similar medallion while giving radio interviews for his album Magna Carta Holy Grail last summer.
And in ‘Heaven’ a track on that album, Jay-Z references the Five-Percenters acronym for Allah by rapping ‘Arm leg leg arm head’.
The Five Percent Nation was founded in 1963 by Clarence Smith, a former student of Malcolm X.
But Smith decided to split off from the Nation of Islam after disagreeing over the idea of God.
Smith didn’t believe that God was a supernatural being, but rather something found in every black man (black women do not have God in them and are considered subordinates, but still hold a higher standing than white people).
Which means he disagreed with the Nation of Islam’s belief that founder Wallace Fard Muhammad was God since Muhammad was bi-racial and not ‘purely black’.