Teen’s rap targets city’s inequality

DELRAY BEACH — A trek along Atlantic Avenue from the low-income west to the posh east inspired a 17-year-old to break into a surprising rap about inequality during a Delray Beach City Commission meeting Wednesday evening.

“The affluent society don’t see what I see,” rapped Jackson Destine, a senior at Delray’s Atlantic High School. “The affluent society don’t know about the poverty. They focus on downtown. What about the poor families? What about the homeless people sleeping on the concrete?”

The 3-minute performance was met with a roar of applause from the crowded commission chambers.

A downtown seemingly segregated by income, with city funding poured into the bustling areas east of Swinton Avenue, prompted Destine to research and create the lyrics.

“I can see what’s going on,” he told The Palm Beach Post. “I can see the lavish lifestyle, people eating good downtown, the nice cars. Then I go back to my poor neighborhood and it doesn’t make sense. It’s literally one street away.”

Destine was introduced to the commission by Atlantic High Principal Tara Ocampo, who described his story as “amazing.”

He first shared a bit about himself: He started selling drugs at the impressionable age of 5; he was kicked out of middle school; his home was repossessed, forcing him and his father to live out of their car for a short period of time.

But the loss of his aunt to breast cancer shortly before Destine began high school was a turning point, he said.

“I had a dream that I would be successful one day,” he said. “That I wouldn’t have to be another black statistic.”

Destine joined the police academy in high school, where instructors mentored him despite his family’s difficult past with police.

Destine is now a supervisor at the police academy, was elected junior class president and plans to go to college.

“I think that the poor neighborhoods are poor because they’re being left out,” he said. “I just hope that some of that money can be put into the communities that need it.”