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Sunday, April 27, 2025
Leftists have long taught that people in the West must take responsibility for centuries of classism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and other gross injustices. Of course, right-wingers constantly ridicule this claim for its “wokeness.” In his new book Coming Clean (MIT Press, 2025), Eric Heinze rejects the idea that we should be less woke. In fact, we need more wokeness, but of a new kind. Yes, we must teach about these bleak pasts, but we must also educate the public about the left’s own support for regimes that damaged and destroyed millions of lives for over a century—Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the Kim dynasty in North Korea.
After completing advanced studies in the University of Paris, Harvard Law School, and the University of Leiden, Eric became Professor of Law in the University of London. His other most recent books include The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech is Everything (MIT Press, 2022) and Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). He has been a Fulbright Fellow (Utrecht), DAAD fellow (Berlin), and Chateaubriand Fellow (Paris), as well as holding grants from the Nuffield Foundation, Harvard University, and the European Union.