At a time where Netflix announces an expansion of inventory for their Black Lives Matter ‘genre’ (included in this expansion is Ibram X Kendi’s Antiracist Baby) and businesses, schools and universities are sharing ‘antiracist’ material for consumption en masse, Curt Jaimungal’s documentary, Better Left Unsaid, provides an alternative perspective on some of the ideologies that underpin today’s blatant forms of identity politics. Featuring insights from intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, this documentary provides an in-depth assessment as to how such ideologies have come to be and what they mean for society.

A distinct feature of this documentary is a structure based on a step-by-step breakdown of commonly-used concepts inherent to today’s identity politics. Terminology such as ‘white privilege’, ‘bimodal gender’ and ‘colourism’ have proliferated in the media and in day to day speech, but have equally caused as much confusion. Better Left Unsaid’s purpose is not only to familiarise the viewer with such concepts but to provide an understanding of their birthplace and their social, political and economic consequences. 

To cater to a wide viewership, the documentary starts off by identifying concepts (e.g. racism, slavery and sexism) that are common to both the layman’s vocabulary and the extreme Left. With the use of snippets from newsreels and recordings of university lectures, the viewer’s pre-existing ideas are starkly contrasted with those of the extreme Left. Bruce Pardy, Professor of Law at Queen’s University, comments on these conceptual redefinitions: 

“If you had people sitting in a room disagreeing about something, that’d sound like a diverse room of opinion, but that’s not what they mean. They mean diversity of appearance and diversity of race.” 

This juxtaposition of ideas vividly showcases exactly how far today’s identity politics have veered from liberal ideas of change; the viewer is made aware of a precipitous ideological gap. This ideological gap functions as the documentary’s preface and, as a result, the rest of the documentary is dedicated to examining this gap. 

As Jaimungal narrates the documentary, he highlights a geographical discovery: how nascent Social Justice ideas that were discussed in university campuses, and mainly by young activist students, have exploded and infiltrated into the ordinary today.  And, any doubts of this prevalence are quickly stamped out when Jaimungal reminds the viewer that they could be satisfying their own curiosity with this potentially “illegal” documentary. 

As the analysis progresses, it becomes apparent why the documentary is called ‘Better Left Unsaid’. The documentary approaches the exploration of such Social Justice Ideas in the form of a filmmaker’s soliloquy. Jaimungal is thinking aloud, asking himself questions, unpacking ideas, being critical of his own conclusions as well as those of others, and finding alternative contexts and viewpoints.  This is why we see a critique and comparison of these arguments on the extreme Left and the extreme Right alike. Given today’s intolerant environment to freedom of thought and expression, perhaps Jaimungal is not the only one who’s had these so-called ‘dangerous’ thoughts? Perhaps they’ve run through the minds of countless others, only to be quashed as thoughts ‘better left unsaid’. 

The documentary crescendos into a bigger, more complex problem that cannot be explicated with standard economic analyses. It slowly and carefully whittles down contemporary arguments surrounding today’s identity politics, like seeing others exclusively through identitarian lenses or the idea of class-based guilt, to a conflict of philosophies. This may surprise some viewers, but these philosophies, in their rawest form, are not entirely new and could be a case of deja vu. These philosophies can be traced back to: Leninist Russia, where the Kulaks, a hyperproductive class of farmers were slaughtered as their hyper-productivity meant that they could accumulate more resources; Maoist China, where seeing people in group optics had brought about a nationwide famine; the Vietnam land reform in the 1950s, a time during which landlords were persecuted for being landowners; Castro’s suppression of free speech in favour of a communist Cuba; Nazi Germany, where Jews were punished for purportedly being the privileged, ‘oppressive’ class; the Rwandan genocide, where Hutus saw themselves at the hands of Tutsi systemic bias and oppression; Sri Lanka, in the late 2000s, where Tamils were slaughtered by its government to favour a group narrative; and today, in modern-day China, with the detainment of Uyghurs in concentration camps. Coupling these group-identity based philosophies with outright rejection and attack on reason, science and empirical knowledge, we then truly come to understand the seething, ugly nature of identity politics on the extreme polar ends of the political spectrum. 

It is philosopher George Santayana that said:

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

For some, both the quote and the ending of the documentary will seem pessimistic, holding a mirror up to our own societal existential crisis and looming fates. If there is one thing that we learn from this documentary, it would certainly be that if we are not prudent with our actions, our thinking, our philosophies, then we risk bruising our freedoms and end up repeating history itself. But, as much as things could go wrong, we can permanently change the trajectory of our future. 

Zara Qureshi @_zaraqureshi

For further information about Better Left Unsaid, please visit the official site here.

Preorder the documentary here.