KK: Agreed, but that’s an easy one. What do you think is unimaginable today that will actually happen in forty years?

BO: Well, I’ll tell you: it’s entirely possible that how we think about our racial divisions will have fundamentally changed forty years from now. This is in part because I’m watching a younger generation that isn’t as caught up as we’ve been with the traditional divisions. The culture of our young people is a polyglot culture. The way the younger generation thinks about love and marriage between races is entirely different from when you or I were growing up. And what’s also true is that it’s not just a black or white issue—you have Latinos and Asians and people from all different cultures. So I think that necessarily that will change for the better. I’m less optimistic if we don’t make good choices about divisions of class and economics. The biggest concern I have, a concern your father had years ago, is that our democracy functions well when every person feels he or she has a stake, when everybody feels it’s possible to make a difference. The Appalachian communities that Bobby Kennedy visited fifty years ago are still the other America. The inner cities are still the other America. So despite all the technological and social developments between 1967 and 2017, what’s been surprisingly constant in our society is the economic stratification, and in many ways it has gotten worse. Our greatest challenge is to have a democracy that is responsive to the people, but for that to happen we need to have an economy that’s responsive to the people. At a time when globalization and new technologies are changing our economic conditions every day, this requires vision, and it requires courage and empathy on the part of those of us who’ve had the luck to benefit from this new economy. We still have to do a lot of work to achieve that.

KK: My father was devoted to reaching young people, and I know you are too. You’ve said that in your postpresidency, you want to focus on the next generation. How will you do that?

BO: When I think about Bobby Kennedy’s legacy, what stands out isn’t laws or policy. It’s inspiration. What he and Dr. King, and other great leaders, were able to inspire in people was action; people followed the example these men set and went out and did something themselves. That’s why I always quote your father’s Ripples of Hope speech. The impact of any individual is always going to be limited, but if we can inspire, if we can motivate, ten people, a hundred people, a thousand people, ten thousand people, we can make big change. I benefitted in my own campaign from the incredible energy and idealism of young people. In my postpresidency, the focus will be on training, supporting, spotlighting, convening this incredible next generation of young people, encouraging them to be active, giving them the tools they need to be effective citizens—nothing can be more important than this. With this generation we have a chance to build bridges of young leadership across national boundaries, racial boundaries, and religious boundaries. One of the things we did during my presidency was to start a young leaders program in Africa and in Asia. In fact, the first place we did it was in a town hall your father had visited in Soweto. We used that as the launching point for something we called the Young African Leaders Initiative that now has over 200,000 young people between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who not only have received training in how they can enhance the work they’re doing in nongovernmental organizations, health organizations, and human rights organizations, but also are now learning from each other, so there’s a network. What I’d like to do is to broaden that, make that more systematic, because if we can take an outstanding young activist who’s teaching girls in a small village in Tanzania and put her in touch with a terrific teacher in an inner-city school in Chicago, and they are learning from each other how best to achieve their mission, not only will we see better results, but also we’re going to create a climate in which government is more responsive. That’s because these young people will end up putting pressure on elected officials to do the right things. So I’m very excited about the next generation. They’re more sophisticated, they’re better informed, they have the world at their fingertips, or at least on their phones, in ways that we didn’t have. I think they’re more open-minded and comfortable with change. But they’re also a little bit more cynical about institutions, and part of what I want to do is make sure they realize how their involvement, their voices, can make a difference in these institutions.

KK: Daddy often talked about youth as our greatest hope, but he also recognized that disaffection among youth spans economic conditions—so he reached out to kids who were dropping out of school in inner cities and he challenged wealthy students who joined large financial institutions rather than serving their communities. So reviving faith that one can make a difference is vitally important. But also then, as now, one of the challenges we face arises from the gap between those in the next generation who have the resources to fulfill their potential and the kids in Chicago who are afraid of getting shot going to school. It’s difficult to bridge that breach.

BO: That’s true, but here’s the interesting thing: I was in Chicago for a day two weeks ago. In the morning I met with about twenty at-risk men between eighteen and twenty-five who were part of a program to help them get jobs. Almost all of them were African American; I think one was Latino. Many of them had been in prison; many of them had been shot; many of them had fired shots. Later, in the afternoon, I was at the University of Chicago with some of its top students who were already involved in government or activism. What was striking was that the conversations I had with those two groups weren’t very different. The young men in both groups were hopeful about the possibilities for their future. They were all responsive to adults giving them attention and a sense of direction. They were all somewhat cynical about existing institutions. Yes, we have many young people who grow up in the toughest of circumstances, and nobody’s paid them any attention. The good news is that they’re resilient, and it doesn’t take a lot to point them in a positive direction. We haven’t been giving them enough support in directing themselves, but if we make even a small investment in mentorship programs and job opportunities, if we expose them to a world beyond the street corner, they will respond. When you talk to the incredibly talented young people at the University of Chicago or at Northwestern, it’s true they have more resources, they have more confidence, but they’re no more confident about how to direct their energies. I know what I’m talking about here: I was one of those young people. I was the young man who was angry because he didn’t have a father around and got into trouble and did drugs. I’ve also been the hotshot young college student who was trying to figure out how to channel his idealism. Both of those young men needed mentors, guides, teachers to say to them, “You count, your voice matters, and here are some tools you can use to make a difference. Here are organizations you can be part of. Here’s a community that recognizes your talents.” That’s how those young people can thrive, and I think I’m in a good position to help with that. It’s what Bobby Kennedy did for millions of Americans, and he also did it for young people in Soweto who became the parents and grandparents of some of the kids I’ve met.

KK: You know, Mr. President, that’s similar to the work we’re doing with the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights education program. It’s called Speak Truth to Power.

BO: Tell me about it.

KK: The curriculum ranges from kindergarten through law school, and we’ve reached millions of students on every continent.

It focuses on human rights, but it also includes social-emotional learning, community organizing, and ways to create change. It’s an empowerment agenda, to transform victims into activists. We provide a book of lesson plans, and we also have hundreds of them online. Our aim is to get students to self-identify as human rights defenders—because when they look in the mirror and they see someone who knows how to make a difference, that is life changing.

BO: That’s wonderful.

KK: We also initiated RFK Young Leaders for urban professionals who are generally between twenty-two and forty-five years old and are interested in social justice. We invite local community organizations to speak to the Young Leaders and ask for volunteers—one month the speaker might talk about mass incarceration, and the next maybe human trafficking. Anyone who wants to attend, comes, and anyone who wants to volunteer has that option. We link capacity with need. And the young leaders have the bonus of meeting others who are interested in making a difference.

BO: I think that’s terrific. The challenge is to pull all the wonderful efforts out there together so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One thing I learned first through organizing and then in politics is that there are many good efforts being made that people just don’t know about. They need to know that they’re not alone in the fight, that there are others who feel the same way they do and are making the same efforts they want to make. One thing you mentioned that we all need to work hard on is improving how we use the internet more effectively to reach young people. They get so much information from the internet. That can be for good, but we’ve also seen how much of it is trivial and commercialized and unreliable and how hate groups can also organize using the internet. I’m not sure we’re doing a good enough job in projecting our values, Robert Kennedy’s values, to kids who spend most of their time on their phones and get most of their information that way. That’s something that didn’t exist when your father was working on these issues. Over the next several years we need to work with Silicon Valley and social media organizations on how we can spur activism through these digital processes—not to replace the work that’s being done on the ground but to motivate and supplement it.

I want us all to work together on that.