Jack Kemp: A Conservative Voice for Racial Justice

It's easy to speak well of someone after he or she has passed. All of the anger and frustration from personal or political opponents seems to wane in the hours after a death; it's as if we finally realize what we ought to all along: we are all in this together.

But it's unnecessary for us to retire frustrations with respect to Jack Kemp, the longtime Republican who kept minority interests at the center of his agenda throughout his political career. When we commented on the death of Jesse Helms last summer, we asked our colleagues and friends who work for social justice to try to move on:

It has been said that the most important way to give is to forgive, and we urge our contemporaries who are similarly committed to social justice to do just that. We sincerely hope that Senator Jesse Helms find the peace that he worked so hard to deny to so many others during his professional career.

In this case, no such call is necessary. Progressives may not agree with Kemp's supply-side tax strategies, but rather than simply cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans and waiting for it to "trickle down," Kemp advocated tax breaks for middle-class folks, too, so that spending power remained in their hands.

More important, though, was his advocacy of "enterprise zones" in urban areas. In essence, these are areas of economic blight that are targeted for tax cuts for businesses who are willing to locate and operate there. It's a typical conservative strategy in the sense that it is based on tax cuts, but it was forward-thinking with respect to being attentive to the unique needs of inner-city neighborhoods and the people who live there.

When we had our exchange with Professor Voegeli last fall, we expressed concern that conservatives not only differ with progressives in terms of how to rectify racial injustice, but they tended to ignore (or give short shrift to) racial injustice altogether. This cannot be said of Jack Kemp. When it came to issues that disproportionately affect racial minorities, he may have disagreed with his progressive contemporaries, but they could never say what Kanye West said about George W. Bush.

Jack Kemp "cared." No doubt about it.