How do I get the unicode/hex representation of a symbol out of the HTML using JavaScript/jQuery?

Say I have an element like this...

<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
  <mo class="symbol">α</mo>
</math>

Is there a way to get the unicode/hex value of alpha α, &#x03B1, using JavaScript/jQuery? Something like...

$('.symbol').text().unicode(); // I know unicode() doesn't exist
$('.symbol').text().hex(); // I know hex() doesn't exist

I need &#x03B1 instead of α and it seems like anytime I insert &#x03B1 into the DOM and try to retrieve it right away, it gets rendered and I can't get &#x03B1 back; I just get α.