Jean-Raymond, by admission, is not an activist. “Designing gives me a platform to communicate my very real feelings towards the things I see and deal with. I don’t consider myself an activist, though — I’m an artist, maybe even a provocateur.” But judging from the explicit theme of police brutality from his prior collection, Jean-Raymond might subscribe to the Nina Simone school of activism. She famously said, “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”It’s a time when young Black men are told that they are are too violent when they agitate for change, but then are blamed when they don’t assert themselves. Black women are told they are impotent and powerless, but are expected to have supernatural resilience. Black communities are told that they need to keep their history in the past, but also to not question the fact that they’re still living out the effects of systematic discrimination that have kept communities in poverty “The Black experience in America is the ultimate double bind; a place where natural-born citizens live an immigrant experience in the only land they’ve known as home. A place where Black culture is praised, commodified, and appropriated, while Black people are criticized, vilified, and hunted for sport. A certain functional schizophrenia has to exist to cope with the dissonance of having a Black man in the White house while a Black body lies for four hours in the streets of Ferguson," read a statement from the brand.