Life is a big town, I heard the comedian say. North Carolina State University is also a big town, with its own streets, housing, bus system, coffee shops, libraries, businesses and mix of people. To live in our big town, you need to understand how it all works. And how it all works is not how it all used to work. Anybody who was a student at NC State 20 years ago can’t tell you much about what’s going on at NC State right now.

When I joined the faculty in 1988, women made up about 30 percent of the student body. Now women make up 45 percent of our student body. And young men, those women are not here for your entertainment or exploitation.

Welcome to the future.  The future is not coming. It’s here and now. Not understanding or accepting that is causing a lot of confusion in America. Indeed, all of the tensions we are witnessing in America today are because for too long in this country, to organize our daily social interactions, we have relied on false categories. Race, sex-of-person, religion, sexual orientation; we have relied too much on those false categories, for getting through our daily walk through life.

Oh don’t misunderstand me; there are ways in which these are real characteristics of persons.  Yes, I am indeed, a big, giant, dark-skinned, black man. Yet that information becomes a false category when people try to use that information, that category, to make judgments to guide the way they interact with me. For too long in America we have relied on false categories; us versus them ways of thinking about people to keep ‘them’ in their place.

But now, today in the future we are living, we are seeing that those categories are false. It is false, you see, to believe that women aren’t smart enough to be engineers, physicists or mathematicians.  It is false to believe that all Muslims are terrorists.  It is false to believe that gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender people have no place at NC State.

In the future we are already living, those false categories don’t work.  And that realization is ripping through our whole nation making too many Americans anxious, tense and sometimes angry. A white nationalist rally in Charlottesville is only the most recent example of that irrational, dangerous anger.

Why does the truth do this to people?  Well, since as children too many people were taught to rely on those false categories that now don’t work, people struggle; people struggle with the question, “who are among the ‘we’ and who are among the ‘they?’” Our too-long history of relying on false categories is now tearing at the soul of America. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” is that soul. And we soil and wound that soul every time we try to rely on a false category.

“Between the World and Me” is our common reading book for this year. But that is not because everyone at the university agrees with or has to agree with the claims made by the author, Mr. Ta-Nehisi Coates.  No, that is not the point at all.

Even though we are both African-American and dark-skinned black males, Mr. Coates and I do not have the same experiences. In the time of horrific legal-racial-segregation, I grew up in the rural deep-South, swamp-land of Louisiana, in a warm and loving family with a mother who was a school teacher and a father who was a fierce voting rights activist.  By contrast, from his book, we learn that Mr. Coates did not have that kind of family foundation. No wonder, Mr. Coates and I do not see the world the same way.

“Between the World and Me,” was not chosen because it is the experience of all black people in America. Don’t be ridiculous. There is no one black experience in America. But likewise, there is no one Latino/Hispanic experience here in America. There is no one white experience here in America. There is no one Haitian experience here in America.

NC State chose this book so that in dialogue about the book you can see that people who appear to be members of the same group can have profoundly different experiences in the world and profoundly different perspectives from each other. We wanted to alert you to the fact that here at NC State, and really wherever you go in life, there will be people with experiences and perspectives different from yours, that you will need to learn to respect.

From the first moment you came into this town called NC State, you began to experience other peoples, other students’, legitimate but different thoughts, feelings and perspectives. If you try to get through your time here hoping to ignore the truth of that social reality, relying on false categories, you will have a miserable experience at this university. If you try to rely on false categories, you will also be showing yourself to have a poor, immature, unhealthy orientation to interacting with other people.

As I teach my students, never try to interact with a person as a representative of a group; never. You see no one person can or should be asked to carry the burden of representing a whole group of people.

This summer, I was asked by an 11th grader, “Dr. Nacoste, if we were to begin our career here at NC State, what advice would you give us for when we get here to get started?”  My answer was, be open, and be serious. Be open because no matter where you come from, when you get here you will feel a bit overwhelmed. Suddenly, you are surrounded by 35,000 new and new kinds of people, moving fast to get to class on time, to get something to eat, to get to some event, all while trying to make friends.  Feeling a bit overwhelmed, you will have a tendency to want to shelter yourself; to stick to whatever you find that seems familiar in some way; maybe the skin-color of the people you hang out with.

Don’t give in to that feeling of being overwhelmed.  This is the time and place to be open; to push yourself into learning about all that this town of NC State has to offer for you to explore your interests and to develop some new interests.

Be serious, was the second part of my answer. NC State is a serious place where we are doing serious work. We are not a high school, not a junior college, not even just a college; there are 12 colleges that make up our high-ranking public, research university. We have work to do and we are doing that work. So here, you need to be serious. Sure, there are plenty of ways for you to have some fun here. No doubt, you’ll find your ways to have fun and you should. But that is not the primary reason you are here; or it better not be.

While you are at NC State you will have the chance to do work to improve and change our world. All students have the chance to contribute to that work because here we do not rely on false categories; everybody here is Wolfpack.

NC State University is where you live now. Wherever you are from internationally, nationally, locally, you’re not back home anymore.  You are now a citizen of the big town of NC State. To be a true citizen of the Wolfpack means that no matter their background group membership, you will interact with your co-student peers with respect. Yes, you have rights here, but as importantly you have responsibilities here because we have serious and high expectations for your academic and social behavior.  

Welcome to the future.  Welcome to the Wolfpack. Welcome to NC State University.

Dr. Nacoste is Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Psychology and the author of “Taking on Diversity: How We Can Move From Anxiety to Respect” (2015; Prometheus Books).