Summary

During a concert, a group from the audience begins shouting insults at fifteen-year-old Janis Ian while she is playing a song about interracial love, “Society’s Child”. The screams and shouts scare Janis, so she interrupts the concert and goes backstage. In the toilet, she begins crying. Janis recalls how she wrote the song a year earlier when she was living in a predominantly African-American community and noticed that children – both white and African-American—were forbidden from having interracial relationships by their parents. After its release, the song was rapidly banned from most radio stations, and Janis and her record company began receiving death threats.  

Janis’ promoter advises the girl to return to the stage, but Janis is frightened ...