Sami asked Barack Obama:

I'll be a freshman in college next year. What inspired you to write this book for "young people," and how can we, young people, change American politics for the better?

Barack Obama Well, I know this is a unique time to be graduating high school and heading to college. It’s already a moment when you begin to take charge of your own life and decide what’s important to you – the kind of career you want to pursue, who you want to build a family with, the values you want to live by. That’s unsettling at any time, and given the state of the world, it can be scarier than usual right now. Your generation has had to grow up faster than most.

And yet, with so much up for grabs right now, your generation also has more power than most to upend the way things have always been done and reshape the world in your own image.

My daughters are only a couple years older than you are. And what I’ve found in your generation is that you actually believe the better lessons your parents and teachers taught you, even when we don’t always live up to those lessons ourselves. You’re more open to people’s differences. You’re less rigid in your thinking about people needing to be a certain way, or having to move through the world a certain way, or how we should measure success. To pick a more concrete example, I think the protests we saw this summer embodied that more expansive moral imagination. White suburban kids, for example, could look at what happened to George Floyd and say, that’s wrong, that’s not the country I want us to be, and I want to do something about it.

Whether it’s social justice or rethinking the economy or really figuring out climate change, I find young people to be both idealistic and impatient. The question is, especially when your generation processes and shares information in far different ways than others, how do we harness those impulses and translate it into actual policy and institutional change without allowing the sometimes slow and frustrating mechanisms of democracy grind down those impulses?

I had to figure all that out myself when I was your age. Your very question places you a few years ahead of where I was. I start my book as a young person, just a mixed-race kid without wealth or power in America, specifically to show you that the presidency wasn’t some kind of birthright for me, or that I was good at everything. I just hitched my wagon to something bigger. If I can make a difference, so can you.

Part of the theme of this book is this contest of ideas between two visions: a vision that says that, for all our differences, we share a common humanity, and it is possible for us, in a multiracial, multiethnic country and world, to see each other, understand each other, respect each other, and work towards progress together. In the scope of human history, this vision is new. This idea that everybody has rights, and everybody’s voice is equal, and together, we can do great things with our democracy – it’s still an experiment. It’s still fragile. But there’s also an older, contrasting vision that says we’re just a collection of tribes, inevitably at war, and it’s all a zero-sum game with winners and losers in hierarchies of power and subjugation. And these contrasting visions are clashing with each other right now, not just in America, but around the world.

Your generation is going to have to decide which way the world goes. I want you to know that it’s within your power to create a better world, and that governments aren’t distant systems that are imposed upon you, they’re systems that you have the agency to control and shape if you’re willing to dive in and keep at it.

More than anything, I wrote this book as an invitation for you not only to imagine a better world – but to build it yourselves.

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