Here’s What Meek Mill And Robert Kraft Had To Say About Fighting Racism And Antisemitism

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“We can’t solve this problem on our own, we need everybody working with us.”

Robert Kraft listens as Meek Mill talks about their friendship. Pat Greenhouse / The Boston Globe

Among the headline events at this year’s NAACP National Convention was a conversation between rapper Meek Mill, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, historian and educator Henry Louis Gates Jr., and NAACP President and CEO Derek Johnson.

In the panel on Sunday moderated by Fox Sports journalist Joy Taylor, the four discussed racism, antisemitism, and combating hate in all its forms.

Racism, antisemitism, and white nationalism

The panelists discussed moments of Black and Jewish solidarity in American history, from the thousands of schools Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald helped build for Black students in the South in the early 1900s to historically Black colleges and universities welcoming Jewish professors fleeing Nazi Germany. Jewish leaders were even among the founding members of the NAACP in 1909.

Racism and antisemitism, Johnson said, are just different manifestations of the same hate and fear that “opportunity will be equalized.”

Gates agreed. “I tell my students at Harvard that under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams: one is anti-Black racism and one is antisemitism,” he said.

“We all remember the nightmare of Charlottesville,” Gates continued. “The day after they were demonstrating against us, they showed up with swastikas, Confederate flags, and Ku Klux Klan robes. That shows you the inextricably intertwined connection between the hatred of Jewish people and the hatred of our people.”

Meek Mill and Robert Kraft’s unlikely friendship

It all began when Kraft visited Mill in prison in 2018. 

“I’m looking at this young man who I have deep affection for, he’s in an orange jumpsuit,” Kraft recalled. “He could be earning millions of dollars, paying taxes, being with his 7-year-old son, and his mom was working two jobs … and he’s in jail on a ridiculous item, and we’re paying as a society to keep him there because of a crazy, bigoted system.”

The two bonded over criminal justice reform and in 2019 were among the co-founders of REFORM Alliance, which advocates to overhaul the American probation and parole system. 

In April 2023, five years after Mill was released from prison, Kraft took him on a trip to Poland to attend the March of the Living at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp honoring Holocaust victims and survivors. 

Mill said it was an eye-opening experience, not least because of the eerie similarities between how Jews were treated in concentration camps and his own experiences being dehumanized in prison.

“In prison, they called us by numbers when they could have called us by names,” Mill reflected. 

Kraft and Mill agreed that racism and antisemitism are both alive and well in America. 

“I know in the case of the Jewish people, we can’t solve this problem on our own, we need everybody working with us,” Kraft said. “People are trying to put boulders between the Black community and the Jewish community, and we’ve always been uniquely tied together.”

The 2024 election

The solidary message will only be more important as the 2024 presidential election nears, Johnson said. 

“The closer we get to the presidential election next year in November, the more intense we’re going to see forces of white supremacy attacking our communities, but more importantly, seeking ways to divide the communities,” Johnson said. “Next year’s election is going to be won by less than 4% of the total vote. If they can create dissension between communities or within the communities, that gives an opportunity [for] the forces of white supremacy to win.”

A second term for Donald Trump, Gates warned, would embolden white sumpremacists.

“Trump feeds these people, he feeds their hatred,” Gates said. “They’re looking for scapegoats ‘cause the world has changed, and they’re not in control anymore, and they haven’t changed with it.”

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