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Desmond grew up in Sarasota. Her parents met in the Northeast, then moved to Florida before she was born. Her mother, Pattie Paradise, is white and her father, Wesley Desmond, was black, which didn’t suit his mother’s family well, Desmond said.
When he was 18 months old and his sister, Nikki, was 3, their father suddenly passed away. Paradise worked two jobs, sometimes three, to take care of it. She married Chris Charron, who is white, when Ian was 5 years old. (The couple divorced 13 years later.)
The family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. When Nikki and Ian were in elementary school, their mother transferred them to a private Catholic school, where they were among the few pupils of color. Ian said he later learned that the school had held a meeting with the student body to announce that he and Nikki would be enrolling. “They had to get the kids ready and say, ‘Hey, there’s black kids coming up, biracial kids,’ Desmond said.
Their family didn’t talk much about race. Paradise and Charron had two more children. “Our sister is eight years younger than me, and people would ask her, ‘Why are your brother and sister brown? Nikki said.
Ian played soccer, with mostly white teammates and opponents. Nikki participated in gymnastics, which was also predominantly white. “It’s fair to say that my sister and I identified as white,” said Ian Desmond. “We knew we were biracial, but we kind of felt like one with the white community.
Yet he encountered racial profiling. As a teenager, he was walking towards a sports authority when he saw a woman approaching the entrance. He hurried to hold the door open for her. Instead of thanking him, she clutched her purse.
“I was like, ohhh,” Desmond said. “It was really nothing to me, but at the same time it was like, man, this lady thought I was going to steal her.”
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