Queens Community Board Member Tries To Defend Racist Rant, Says More Racist Stuff

CORONA, QUEENS — If anyone had been inclined to excuse Ann Pfoser Darby — the longest-serving member, and notorious loose cannon, of Queens Community Board 4 — for her anti-immigrant rant at a recent board meeting, Darby's attempts to clear up the controversy will likely cure them of all that.

Darby originally said at a Tuesday night board meeting on proposed bike lanes for 111th Street that soon, once the feds round up all the city's undocumented immigrants, there will be no more need for bike lanes in NYC.

She based her comments on the bizarre stereotype that only immigrants ride bicycles.

"When ICE goes through, logically speaking, they're not going to have people using bike lanes," Darby said at the meeting. (An audio recording is available here.)

"There's no sense... to do the bicycle lanes on Queens Boulevard because they'll have to be removed, and all over the city" she said at the meeting. "Because people are not there to ride those bicycles anymore. The people are back home, and there's going to be more people back home. And the federal money is not going to come into this city. We've gone too far. We've gone a little too far!"

Despite repeated attempts, Patch could not reach Darby for comment.

Unfortunately for Darby, a few other local news outlets did manage to get a hold of her on Wednesday. In followup interviews with these outlets, the 30-year community board veteran effectively dug herself a hole so deep she's in danger of gophering out in China.

Here are six lowlights.

• Asked how she could tell if only immigrants were using bike lanes, Darby told ABC7: "Some people wear unusual dress, so you can tell if they are bred and born here."

• Responding to the same question from DNAinfo, she said she used "observation and logic" to pick an immigrant out of a crowd. "You can kind of tell, especially sometimes the way they dress."

• And once more, again answering the same question from NBC4, she said: "Well, I use certain kinds of dress, the people I know use certain kind of dress. If different people wear different kids of dress, you know they're different kinds of people."

• Darby also told DNAinfo that, using her acute observational skills, she determined recently that ICE has already rounded up the majority of NYC's bicycle-riding illegals. "I see who goes by and who doesn't, and there was a lot of people going by to work early in the morning, and like about 90 percent of them are gone," she said — a clear sign that they had been "picked up by ICE." She then said: "It looks like they were illegal aliens, I don't know, I didn't speak to them."

• Things got even cringier in her convo with NBC4. "They were telling me, ICE is going through Corona, Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, so when ICE goes through, logistically speaking, they're not going to have people using bike lanes," Darby said.

• And finally, summing up her general life approach to NBC4: "I'm a realist, not a racist. I speak the truth."

An avalanche of local leaders and politicians have since called for Darby to be kicked off Community Board 4, ending a long and colorful tenure that began way back in 1987.

Queens Borough President Melinda Katz is the only one with the power to fire Darby. A spokeswoman for Katz said in an email to Patch that since this year's Community Board member application process is already "well underway, and includes an application from Ms. Darby for reappointment," the borough president will wait to announce her decision on Darby — and all other board appointments — until the end of March, as previously scheduled.

As a bandaid fix, though, Katz will hold a "unity rally" 4 p.m. Sunday at Queens Borough Hall "for communities to come together in solidarity against exclusion, division and hate."

On the sunnier side of this whole whole slow-motion train wreck out in Corona, a local hero has emerged in the form of Darby's neighbor, Sherry Tang.

"She's nice to me," Tang, an immigrant from China, told ABC7. "Sometimes I help her to shovel snow."

And to NBC4, the neighbor said: "I know she has opinions, but I don't comment on her opinions."

Lead photo courtesy of Juan Restrepo