Why have black football players decided to take a knee during the national anthem?

Why are black male athletes in football and others sports speaking out against police brutality and social injustice — and rebuking the president’s response to the anthem protests?

Why do black males, in general, feel dismissed as if their lives don’t matter?

“Question Bridge: Black Males,” an exhibition that opened Friday at the Oakland Museum of California, couldn’t be a more timely show, because it offers insight into those questions.

The video installation features more than 150 black males from across the country and from various socioeconomic backgrounds sharing their life experiences.

The show is confrontational and haunting, but it’s needed right now — especially if you’re questioning the motives of Colin Kaepernick and other black men who are taking a stand for social justice.

The video installation, by artists Chris Johnson and Hank Willis Thomas, is a collaboration with filmmakers Bayeté Ross Smith and Kamal Sinclair. Johnson, who is based in Oakland, told me Thomas got involved so they could create something that would allow black men to speak for themselves. The collaboration seeking to present a nuanced portrait of black male identity began in 2007, before Barack Obama was elected president.

Ten years later, Johnson isn’t surprised that black men are being attacked for exercising their rights.

“You do these things as artists with idealistic notions that we would change consciousness,” Johnson said. “Who would know that all these years later that, in fact, the issues that we were dealing with are more relevant now, more timely now, and seem more needed now than even then.”

I saw myself in the men speaking their truths, just like I see myself in Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality.

“I’m not naive about how deeply rooted racism and injustice and profiling are — the struggles that black men feel to find identity, to find a place,” Johnson said. “All those things are systemic.”

Johnson directed black men to pose a question they’d always wanted to ask another black man. The men appear on a bank of five monitors in the darkened, movie theater-like exhibition space.

How do you maintain personal peace?

“I practice meditation,” responds a man wearing a blazer. “I practice prayer. ... I just rest in that moment.”

As he speaks, a man wearing a black T-shirt appears on another screen with his eyes closed, as if meditating. Your eyes are drawn to his calmness.

“The choreography of voices was intended to create a sense of surprise,” Johnson said. “We didn’t want you to be able to know exactly where you were going to be forced to look. We wanted to keep you a little off guard.”

The screens are set in pillars that are arranged in an arc. It implies a circle, as if viewers are part of an intimate conversation in a safe space. It encourages viewers to acknowledge the presence of black men.

To look them in the eyes. To see their faces.

To see that black men aren’t a monolith.

Celebrities such as rapper Killer Mike and actors Malik Yoba, Jesse Williams and Delroy Lindo, who lives in Oakland, were interviewed. Andrew Young, an early leader of the civil rights movement, tells a story about how he knew his late wife, Jean, was the woman he’d marry. Young peppers the anecdote with stories from the movement, touching on his relationships with Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.

So why do black men nod when they pass each other on the street? One man’s response startled me, because it was so honest.

“I’m more concerned with the brothers that don’t give me the nod,” he said. “Those are the brothers I wonder about.”

The museum acquired “Question Bridge” for its permanent collection. As you enter the exhibition space, you pass a single screen flicking through faces that are purposely out of focus. Their lips move, but you don’t hear what they’re saying because there’s no audio.

René de Guzman, the museum’s senior curator of art, said the images were a metaphor for black male identity, how easily it can be ignored.

“You see these kind of seductive images, but you can’t quite grasp it,” he said as we watched the faces change. “It’s something that you’re aware of. You know that there’s something important, but it’s hard to grasp.”

It’s not hard for me to grasp how powerful it is to put people into a situation — a room full of black men sharing their thoughts — that might make some of them uncomfortable. It’s because a show like this has the power to transform, but only if viewers want to listen.

“This is the broadest and deepest and most honest representation of black male consciousness that we can imagine, and we’re going to drop you in the middle of it,” Johnson said. “And we know that you will perceive black men differently than you did before.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr