Need to battle hate existed long before now

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Martin Walsh took a righteous stance Monday, pushing for passage of a federal hate crime reporting bill. They joined a coalition of 19 area social justice, civil rights and business organizations in announcing support for the U.S. Senate to pass the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer No Hate Act.

Healey noted: “In this moment, I think we need to do everything we can on the local, state and federal level to address systemic racism, and to continue the fight to secure basic human rights.”

But the bipartisan Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer No Hate Act was proposed in June of last year. It’s been “this moment” for a while.

Both Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer were murdered in hate crimes. Khalid in 2016, in front of his family home in Tulsa, Okla.; and Heather in 2017, on a street in Charlottesville, Va. Both murders were prosecuted as hate crimes, but neither was reported as such in official government statistics.

The Jabara-Heyer No Hate Act would result in grants for states to establish hate crime reporting hotlines, and authorize funding for state and local law enforcement to develop policies on identifying, investigating and reporting hate crimes.

The legislation has hardly been kept under wraps.

Last August, Susan Bro and Haifa Jabara, the mothers of Heather Heyer and Khalid Jabara, respectively, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times about their children’s murders, hate crime reporting and the legislation.

The bill was the focus of reporting by CNN and other news outlets.

It was good legislation then, and it’s good legislation now.

So where were political leaders standing against hate crimes all these months as the bill moved through the halls of Congress?

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis two months ago sparked calls for racial justice across the country — but racial injustice and hate crimes are hardly new. Outrage from political leaders rings a little hollow when it’s so late in the game.

“Ultimately, it’s about making sure that we are all fundamentally in this time, particularly in this time, grappling with and reckoning with the systemic racism that has pervaded all institutions and aspects of society for far too long,” Healey said. The bill is a “meaningful step in my view that has power to hold perpetrators accountable,” she said.

It was a meaningful step last year, too.

In promoting the bill, the mayor added, “We cannot let this moment or this movement pass us by,” Walsh said. “We need to demand action right now, as we are today. We must do everything that we can to stop hate in its track and stand up for what is right.”

There are, in a sense, two movements — one in which it’s vital to be seen as an ally, to be in the spotlight on the frontlines calling for change. The other is the movement for actual, working-inthe-trenches, getting things done transformation.

The latter comes about whether the mics are on or not. Whether there’s a national impetus to do the right thing, or not. It isn’t just Healey and Walsh, though they are actors on our stage — but where were the Democratic lawmakers who knelt on the floor of the Capitol wearing stoles of kente cloth when the Jabara-Heyer No Hate Act was moving through Congress last year?

It could have used the power of their voices.

Going forward, the rallies may trickle and stop, but the work will have to go on. Who will show up?