Boynton and her crew spend time in a variety of States that existed during the Civil War, in particular Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi, and examine attitudes, practices, and types that you'd expect to see examined in a movie like this. There are Old South-loving Civil War re-enactors and aggrieved descendants of the Confederacy who feel attacked whenever they see statues glorifying the Confederacy being toppled, or hear historians stating that white people as a group still owe sympathy, and perhaps reparations, to the descendants of slaves. There are Black and white Northerners and liberals who seem delighted that sentimentalizing former slaveholders is has finally become not just morally repugnant in the United States, but socially unacceptable as well. The film also takes care to point out that racism wasn't (and isn't) just a southern problem, noting that after the war, white supremacy was the one thing that white Americans in every geographical region could eagerly agree on.
There's also a sub-theme about what, exactly, the Civil War was "really" about. Boynton doesn't spend much energy indulging people who insist that the war was "really" about State's rights. The reputable historian's rejoinder is some variation of The right do do what?, and the filmmaker poses that question or lets others do it for her. It's fascinating to watch counter-examined individuals retreat into bromides about the overreach of the federal government or alternative timelines in which slavery was phased out on a voluntary basis, as if zones of forced servitude were morally no worse than smoking sections in restaurants in the 1990s. One half of a team of men who tend a cemetery for the Confederate dead take the "Good German" point-of-view, stating, "I would have fought for the south. It had nothing to do with political reasons. My home was being invaded." (His use of verb tense is fascinating—it's as if he was there during the war.)
The film musters as much empathy as it can for whites who are still enamored with fantasies of life during the Confederacy, especially as they struggle with the question of whether people who don't own slaves at this moment in time owe anything to the descendants of slaves, or if they continue to benefit economically from slavery. But as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that what's really being talked about is truth, reconciliation, and national deprogramming. Visits with esteemed Civil War historians, as well as academics specializing in abolition, liberation, and Afro-American studies, take on the intimate, mutually validating, warm feeling of group therapy sessions for survivors of abuse: finally there's a space where survivors can talk about what happened to them, without being told that it never happened, didn't happen that way, or wasn't as traumatizing as they feel it was.
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