Rapper Meek Mill and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft shared a stage Sunday (July 30) at the NAACP National Convention in Boston to denounce racism and anti-Semitism.

“We have to stand together and stand proud and push back on this to keep the vibrancy of this country,” Kraft said, speaking on a panel titled “Hate Has No Home: Racism, Anti-Semitism and Building Bridges to Fight Hate,” according to local station GBH.

According to Kraft’s organization, The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, Jews account for just 2.4 percent of the U.S. population but 8.7 percent of hate crime victims, as hate crimes targeting Jews are on the rise.

Black people continue to bear the brunt of hate crimes. FBI data showed that anti-Black bias was at the root of the 11.6 percent surge of hate crimes in 2021, Reuters reported.

In his remarks, Kraft also criticized the racial bias in the nation’s criminal justice system. The billionaire recalled visiting Mill in prison when the rapper was serving a probation violation sentence and thinking that Mill’s life was being wasted.

“He’s in a jail on a ridiculous item and we’re paying, as a society, to keep him there because of a crazy, bigoted system. And so we have to change that,” Kraft stated.

Kraft advocated for Mill while the rapper was incarcerated. Mill was released early from prison in 2018 after initially being sentenced to two to four years for probation violations in decade-old gun and drug convictions.

Mill told CBS Mornings last year that his time under probation almost kept him "from having a fair shot at life that the average young Black man should have." He’s now focused on criminal justice reform through the nonprofit Reform Alliance, which he co-founded in 2019 with Jay-Z and others.

This isn’t the first time that Mill and Kraft teamed up on this issue. In April, Mill joined Kraft’s delegation on a 3-kilometer march in Poland to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp complex to honor victims and survivors of the Holocaust, the Associated Press reported at that time.

Jews accounted for an estimated 1 million of the 1.1 million people who were killed in Auschwitz over a 5-year period.

Mill noted the parallels between what he saw at the concentration camp and other injustices he’s seen.

“And I tell Robert, it’s sort of like when you’re watching the news, you see a 30-second clip of a young girl killed in the hood,” he on the panel, according to GBH. “I would believe you all…would all care about it, but it’s hard to attach to it if you wasn’t physically involved. You know, Robert took me there and I seen that for my own self and it just gave me what it gave him when he came to the prison and seen me, you know?”

Historian and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson joined Mill and Kraft on the panel.

Gates explained how anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism are connected.

“I tell my students at Harvard that under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams,” Gates said, according to GBH “One is anti-Black racism and one is anti-Semitism. And anytime a demagogue wants to stir up people, they just lift up the floorboards and dipper out all that hatred against our people and against our Jewish brothers and sisters.”