What does it mean to be a black man?

To be just another statistic, behind bars, on his way to prison or about to drop out of school? To be an up from the bootstraps overachiever, who overcame the tough odds of poverty and a single parent household and is now considered “a credit to his race”? Or a man dipped in diamond crusted celebrity, who plays for the entertainment of others?

Indeed, being a black man in America can mean inhabiting a border area of either between possibility or peril, being the scourge of the country or the over-the-moon outlier who has broken away from the pack.

But what of the inner life of black men: their hopes, dreams, fears, loves-- their reflective anger, their quiet vulnerabilities, their complex passions?

What of their emotions and impulses, on the lower frequencies, that makes them, and all of us, human?

BrotherSpeak is an award winning five-part series that explores these questions. Originally published on the Washington Post’s website, the series asks a range of black men to explore their deepest thoughts, feelings and aspirations.

Each video tackles a different emotion or impulse: Fear, Love, Dream, Rage. We also asked 6 black men in August 2014, to discuss their reactions to the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Their responses offer a fresh perspective on how black men live in 21st century America: Instead of trying to further explain the usual stereotypes that have defined black men for centuries-- that relegate their experience to narrow one dimensional tropes-- BrotherSpeak places the thoughts, emotions and concerns of everyday black men in the mainstream of universal truths: for everybody loves, everybody fears, everybody has dreams.

Ultimately the essence of BrotherSpeak is to connect the black male experience to the universal truths that define us all. For as John Steinbeck once wrote, No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.