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Queens Tribune — “No worry I have kindergartners make pamphlet 4 English ppls to read Chinese signs. It be all ok. Me love you all long time! #NY06”.

In the context of a lifetime, or even a congressional race, they barely equated to the flicker of an eyelash: four tweets in total, fired across cyberspace to a handful of followers. Just one day later, they would be nonexistent. Yet within those four tweets from the Twitter handle Grace Meng-owitz, a familiar dread crept through Adam Lombardi.

The screen name on the micro-blogging site was just one example of a number of accounts created anonymously last week to mock candidates in the New York Sixth District’s Congressional Democratic primary. Queens may be hailed as the most diverse county on Earth, but Lombardi knows, like a foot soldier staggering home from a traumatic tour of duty, that in the world of local politics, racial and ethnic attacks — veiled or blatant — can become commonplace during an election.

“I was disgusted, absolutely disgusted,” Lombardi, a member of the Clinton Democratic Club of Northeast Queens and the founder of the political blog Queens Politics, said. “There’s a fine line between satire and disparaging a person. I was not surprised at all when I saw the tweets, especially when stakes are so high for a congressional race.”

Lombardi has worked on several Queens campaigns, both Democratic and Republican, and fears that the race for the open congressional seat in the freshly-drawn 6th District will devolve into racial and ethnic warfare. The district cuts across the heart of Queens, running from Middle Village and Maspeth all the way to the Cross Island Parkway, and encompasses several distinct demographics that all candidates will be desperately vying for.

A true Queens district (all other congressional districts in Queens also include portions of the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn or Long Island), the 6th is a microcosm of the borough, lumping together the white working class Catholic demographic of Western Queens with a 17 percent Hispanic population, a 38 percent Asian population, a large Jewish population that ranges anywhere from 20 to 30 percent and a staunch organized labor voting bloc that blurs racial lines. These percentages reflect total population, not voting age population.

Such a racially and economically diverse stew will test campaign operatives and the candidates themselves. To win the race, frontrunners Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Hillcrest), Assemblywoman Grace Meng (D-Flushing) and Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Middle Village) will have to appeal to specific voting blocs. Lancman, who is Jewish, called Jeffrey Gottlieb’s entrance into the race a Meng campaign-driven ploy to split the Jewish vote. Since Gottlieb’s ballyhooed entry, a Chinese public access television show host, Juan “Ada” Sheng, and a Bayside allergist, Dr. Robert Mittman, have submitted petitions to appear on the ballot.

With Anthony Weiner’s scandalous departure and U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman’s (D-Bayside) retirement, New York City is left with one Jewish congressman who represents a significant portion of New York City, U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan). In the 1980’s, New York City could claim at one time as many as seven Jewish congressmen. Queens’ remaining and sizable Jewish population has ensured the issue of Israel’s security is at the forefront of all campaigns, including Councilman Dan Halloran’s (R-Whitestone) and Meng’s.

American Realities

Most political insiders expect Lancman to carry the vast majority of the Jewish vote, while Meng will carry, according to several sources, as much as 98 percent of the Asian vote. Of the 38 percent of the district that is Asian, many are not yet registered as Democrats, however. The unusually rapid growth of Queens’ Asian population in the 1990s and 2000s, especially in once predominately white Jewish areas like Flushing, has bred underlying ethnic tensions. During the 2000s, Queens’ Asian population grew at 300 times the rate of the rest of the borough.

“All of New York City is changing so fast, demographically,” said James Hong, Civic Participation Coordinator of the MinKwon Center for Community Action, a nonpartisan Korean-American advocacy group based in Flushing. “Any number of candidates can try to unfortunately abuse racial dynamics in Northeast Queens.”

Thus far, the Democratic candidates have publicly promised to keep the campaign focused on issues like America’s fragile economic growth and austerity measures being imposed by a Republican-dominated Congress. Hong said he still has dark memories from 2009’s 19th District City Council race between Halloran and Kevin Kim. The acrimonious contest, swirling around Halloran’s pagan faith and Kim’s Asian heritage, included a Halloran mailing that superimposed Kim on a photo of downtown Flushing, warning against “your neighborhood” being overdeveloped.

“The message ‘Don’t vote for the Asian guy’ will go down in the annals of history as one of the ugliest campaign slogans,” Lancman said in 2009. While Halloran’s campaign attacked Kim’s for an organized effort to tear down campaign sites, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund accused a Republican New York City Election Commissioner, Judith Stupp, of confiscating palm cards from Korean voters entering a polling site in Flushing. The voters, lacking English proficiency, struggled to vote, alleged AALDEF.

Going back further, 1997’s City Council Democratic primary battle between Julia Harrison and current Comptroller John Liu, who would eventually win the seat when Harrison retired four years later, was a disturbing reminder of how American dreams can ram up against American realities: Harrison drew condemnation for characterizing her emerging Asian neighbors as part of an “invasion,” more like “colonizers than immigrants” in a New York Times interview.

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By Ross Barkan