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Nicola's parents consulted me at the request of her kindergarten teacher after an incident in which she had been tied up by a group of boys and shoved into the bathroom at school. Her parents were very angry at the school, frightened that the incident had been prompted by racism, and were worried that their daughter might have been traumatized.
The parents were highly accomplished, physically beautiful professionals. Each was the first family member to achieve a doctoral degree, and they now occupied a prominent position in the community. The father was an academic, and the mother was a clinician. Nicola was their only child.
Her mother emphasized the fact that, although Nicola was the only black child in her class, the school had been carefully selected because of its commitment to diversity and took the position that what had transpired had nothing to do with their daughter's color. Her father stated that a black child is always a black child and needs to know what reality is in a white society, but he conceded that he had never expected anything like this to happen in the liberal private school they had so carefully selected for their daughter.
Nicola was a beautiful, petite five-year-old. She shook my hand in the waiting room and separated easily from her parents. I immediately noted that in addition to her striking physical beauty, she was wearing an extraordinary dress. In some complex way it resembled a medieval gown and descended to just above the child's ankles. I thought that it must have been hard for her to walk, much less run, without tripping. I wondered about my thought. Surely in no way related to my conjecture, I hoped, Nicola took a kind of skip, tripped, and fell as she entered my office. Because the door was still open, both parents viewed this misadventure. They appeared not to notice or at least did not react.