There's Waldo

A man is tangled in a beach umbrella. Two women are stuck inside the same shirt. A child has a floatie around his head. Hundreds of colorful figures crowd together, waving, tripping, swimming, dropping towels, and carrying melting ice cream cones.

Yet I don’t notice any of their tomfoolery. My eyes scan a sea of chaos, fixed on one mission: red-and-white stripes, round glasses, and a bobble hat. A flash of red catches my eye, but it belongs to the wrong shirt. A pair of glasses appears, but on the wrong face. Red-and-white stripes flicker between the crowd, only to be a misleading parasol. 

At last, impossible to miss: Waldo.

I felt triumphant, as if I had a superpower to spot something others couldn’t. But in my search for Waldo, the hundreds of people just as interesting as him seemed irrelevant; they only existed in relation to him. I noticed the glasses and the red-and-white stripes because they fit my expectations of what I wanted to see. Those acknowledgments of the other man in the glasses and the parasol were fleeting as they disappeared into the chaos.

Many of us inadvertently search for Waldo in every room we walk into. Just as his stripes are enough to single him out, we notice a student sitting alone before we notice the many conversations happening around them. We presume they are lonely, but they may just need peace to study. Though the assumptions can come from genuine curiosity, they’re quick, baseless judgments.

And we often define people based on them.

Our community has conditioned us to perceive people like we search for Waldo.

Our tendency to generalize our narrow assessment of others extends to service work. Before even meeting the people we hope to support, we internalize the labels assigned to them: “low-income families”, “underserved communities”, “elderly residents.” Like Waldo’s striped shirt, glasses, and bobble hat, these labels require us to be aware of and looking for them. When we interact with these individuals, our community has already established preset expectations that overshadow the unmentioned, superior qualities of them.

This can manifest as walking into a community having learned that it is “underprivileged”, already conditioned to notice what is missing. A cramped apartment, an old building, and limited resources seem to confirm the description I was given. 

Everything else that does not fit the label fades into the background, just like the hundreds of ridiculous little figures surrounding Waldo. A family laughing over a home-cooked meal, neighbors looking after one another, a tradition that has lasted for years, and bright smiles can remind us that “underprivileged” may describe a portion of someone’s circumstance without describing an entire person.

Admittedly, the label can be accurate. Waldo is wearing red-and-white stripes, the student is sitting alone, and the community lacks resources. The problem begins when the trait that helps us notice someone becomes the detail that defines them.

How can we be seen without being reduced to a label?

The woman in a striped sweater is more than a maybe-Waldo; the student in the library is more than a loner; a community is more than the hardship attached to its name.

Finding Waldo is not the hardest part of Where’s Waldo? books. We have to remind ourselves that there are pages of people left to see.