If the perspective I was given at birth is that ‘America will always be segregated, America is black and white, I’ll always be treated differently’ — which is what my parents told me — I’m always going to look at the world in that way. I’m always going to be looking for instances when I’m confirming my base perspective.

If my starting perspective is that racism is dead, social injustice is no longer a thing and now the President is fucking up my family’s ability to make money — if that’s my base perspective of course I’m going to look at Black Lives Matter as a militant group. Of course I’m going to overlook the shit Trump says.

It’s perspective. It’s that kind of understanding I wish people would try more to have.

Joshua Charles Woodard '18, photographer, musician, Co-founder of the MIT BoSTEM Scholars Academy, and Co-chair of Chocolate City

In 2014, four MIT students created Humans of MIT, a Facebook portrait-blog inspired by Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York, that captures life in the MIT community through a single photo and the subject’s own words.