Natalie Cranberry

“And it feels very similar to rushing a sorority; the planned conversation with the more important sorority sisters, always pretty, usually white, who've already gone through a list of photos and have their favorites pegged and the answers to their questions preloaded. "Oh, no way! You were a cheerleader, too?! So was I! You'll fit in so well in our house!" Meanwhile, we, of source, knew she was a cheerleader because we spent days studying the rushee's photos and applications, and we already knew which ones we'd be attacking. And here I am, in my mid-thirties, re-creating the same behavior to sell a similar promise of a different sisterhood.”
― Emily Lynn Paulson, Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing

“We became who we are through a monumental effort at forgetting: what to call this kind of tree, when to plant this seed, how to gods prefer to be addressed. We may revere our ancestors, but non of us would truly recognize them. Knowing human society, past and present, is a race against oblivion.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“The mobilization of sham science to justify bigotry might be said to be a deep characteristic of only one culture: that of the developed West. Northern Europeans and their diaspora, having conquered much of the world, predictably sought to remake it in their image. They filled it with imagined races and subtypes, imbeciles and geniuses, primitives and civilized men. They then declared their intellectual artifice to be deeply, provably natural, as unshakable as a god-made Valhalla.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

“The disappointment of my life,' he told Ernst, was that Americans had succumbed to nationalism. His adopted country had come to look more and more like Germany or any other European nationstate: obsessed by its own purity, wary of outsiders, and more concerned with being great than doing good. Americans turned out to be less exceptional than anyone, himself included, had supposed.”
― Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century