The Daily Princetonian - Mar. 1, 2019

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Friday March 1, 2019 vol. cxliii no. 20

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STUDENT LIFE

Tiger Confessions posts more about mental health

IN TOWN

JOE SHLABOTNIK / FLICKR

The actor may have been driving a white pickup truck.

By Marissa Michaels Contributor

“if i killed myself, would anyone notice my absence? would anyone remember my name after a week? a month? a year? would the world be any worse than it is now?” reads the beginning of a Tiger Confession post from Feb. 14.

Suicidal posts illustrate the increase in the wideranging number of posts about mental health, correlated with a general increase in activity on Tiger Confessions, a student-run Facebook group created on October 30, 2018; the group currently boasts over 4,000 followers and over 6,000 posts.

The group allows students to anonymously post anything from random compliments to suicidal thoughts, and conversation around mental health on Tiger Confessions includes a variety of topics, including self-harm, depression, anxiety, and loneliness, among others. These posts have ignited changes in how the page is run and how students interact on the page.

Throughout the two months that Tiger Confessions was active in 2018, only one post mentioned the word “suicidal,” in reference to other people’s mental health.

In January alone, there were 11 posts that said the words “suicide” or “suicidal,” four of which explicitly expressed suicidal thoughts. In February, there were 18 posts that mention the words “suicide” or “suicidal,” in 8 of which people explicitly express their own suicidal thoughts.

There have been 1660 posts on TigerConfessions in 2018, 2298 posts in January, and 2154 posts in February. Posts mentioning the words “suicide” or “suicidal” were 0.06 percent of 2018 posts, 0.48 percent of January 2019 posts, and 0.84 percent of February 2019 posts.

The causes of suicidal ideation mentioned on Tiger Confessions include

In Opinion

school-related stress, Bicker, and relationship issues, with users posting, “I never feel as close to suicide as I do right after taking a test that’s worth half of my grade” and “I think I am going to commit suicide if I get hosed.”

In a Q&A with The Daily Princetonian in January, Ty Ger, the original anonymous administrator of Tiger Confessions, said, “Some of [the posts] are very detailed, and I’m not sure if I should post them. But I also feel like I have an obligation to post them. Because, the last thing you want for someone who submits something like that is to feel like they’re just talking to no one and that their problems are being ignored … But on the other hand, I feel like when you crowdsource advice, it’s maybe not the best way to get help.”

To rectify this, Ty Ger provides trigger warnings on posts that might disturb readers.

“Some people include trigger warnings with their submissions, while others have to be added by me and the other moderators. We have gotten many messages saying it would be helpful to have trigger warnings for sensitive topics like sexual assault, which is what prompted us to start doing that,” Ty Ger wrote in texts with the ‘Prince.’

Now trigger warnings include “self-harm,” “suicidal ideation,” “eating disorder,” “rape,” and more.

Ty Ger confirmed that submissions remain anonymous to the page’s administrators and that they have never reported a post to psychological services.

“There have been some posts I have felt uncomfortable posting, particularly ones that sound like suicide notes,” Ty Ger wrote. “That’s probably the hardest situation for me to know how to handle, because it’s risky to post something like that on a public platform See CONFESSIONS page 2

Managing editor Samuel Aftel revisits Michael Jackson’s career and controversies in light of a new documentary, and we look back at some of our favorite cartoons.

PAGE 6

By Benjamin Ball The Princeton Police Department (PPD) has received a report of a groping incident that occurred near campus on Tuesday, Feb. 26, according to a crime alert on the Department of Public Safety’s (DPS) website.

According to the alert, the incident happened at 9:45

a.m. on Franklin Ave. The victim, a 19-year-old female, reports that while she was approaching Walnut Lane, her buttocks were grabbed from behind.

The alert also says that the victim described the actor as a “Hispanic looking male around 5’ 4”, heavy set with medium skin tone, wearing a black skull cap or watch cap type hat.”

ON CAMPUS

ON CAMPUS

Head News Editor

The actor may be driving a white pickup truck, according to the alert, but the make and model are unknown.

“DPS doesn’t have any other information about the incident, which PPD is investigating,” Deputy University Spokesperson Mike Hotchkiss wrote in an email to The Daily Princetonian.

PPD did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Kruse, Zelizer talk political partisanship

By Oliver Effron Assistant News Editor

In a panel discussion held in the Friend Center, history professors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer spoke on their investigation of how the partisan divide in American political life came to be.

Promoting their new book, “Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974,“ the two professors discussed the intellectual origins for the modern Democratic and Republican parties and how historical social movements, technology, and the media enabled the election of Donald Trump. African American Studies department chair Eddie Glaude moderated the panel.

According to Zelizer, the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, “fault lines” — areas of intense political disagreement — “aren’t always a bad thing.” Partisan political parties, he said, help to prevent intra-party division through providing voters with distinct policy agendas.

To Kruse and Zelizer, the real problem is what one member of the audience referred to as “fault chasms” during See KRUSE page 2

YAEL MARANS / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Karakatsanis has primarily worked on civil rights cases for the past five years.

Q&A with Civil Rights Corps founder, director Alek Karakatsanis

By Yael Marans Contributor

Alec Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps.

He works to combat human caging, surveillance, the death penalty, immigration laws, war, and inequality. He gave a lecture through the Wilson School on Wednesday, titled “The Bureaucracy of Human Caging.”

On Thursday, he spoke with The Daily Princetonian about his work.

DP: Could you tell me a little bit about your path and what led you to founding the Civil

Today on Campus 6:30 p.m.: Princeton University Sinfonia performs a concert, free and open to the community Rocky Common Room

Rights Corps?

AK: I wanted to do the work that I was doing more broadly, across the country, and not just in D.C. I wanted to challenge the criminal justice bureaucracy in all of its ugliness. Secondly, I didn’t like having a boss. I wanted to be my own boss and do my own thing and not have people tell me that what I wanted to do was too radical. Third, I wanted to be a lawyer in service of a broader movement, and not just doing legal stuff, but also having the freedom and ability to incorporate all other kinds of work and work with See Q&A page 2

WEATHER

TASHI TREADWAY / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

Tiger Confessions is a student-run Facebook group with over 4,000 members.

Police report Tuesday groping incident on Franklin Avenue

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37˚

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Snow showers chance of snow:

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The Daily Princetonian

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Friday March 1, 2019

Zelizer: Some arguments should not Proportion of posts be conceded because they’re wrong about suicide increased KRUSE

Continued from page 1

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the Q&A: when issues of partisanship become so severe that the government is unable to address a crisis, or when leaders, under the auspices of their parties, take actions that would normally fall out of the realm of traditional discourse.

One historical explanation Kruse and Zelizer gave for the current partisan divide is, perhaps surprisingly, MTV. According to Kruse, MTV and other new television networks of the 1980s focused on what he called “narrowcasting,” a play on “broadcasting.”

“Instead of trying to go broad, [networks] were focusing really narrow,” he said.

They said that the new preponderance of niche

television ultimately led to the advent of ultrapartisan networks such as as MSNBC and Fox. Even C-SPAN — in theory, one of the least partisan networks on television — was used for political purposes, they said. Zelizer recalled a story of Newt Gingrich, who, before ascending to Speaker of the House, used the continuously rolling cameras to deliver inf lamed speeches to an empty chamber.

“It looked like Democrats had no response,” Zelizer said.

Zelizer and Kruse said that the 1980s and ’90s saw issues of race and social justice emerge as political fault lines. They spoke in depth about the now-infamous Willy Horton advertisement, which they viewed as the antecedent to the President’s tweets about Mexicans and immigrants.

However, according to Kruse and Zelizer, during the Bill Clinton administration, there was one issue of true bipartisanship: the development of what Glaude called “the carceral state.”

“What you see from Democrats — Joe Biden too, it should be noted — is an embrace of ‘law and order,’” Kruse said.

During the Q&A, members of the audience asked how these fault chasms can be resolved.

Zelizer, for one, believes that without serious reform within our political institutions, they won’t.

“We’re not going to get over these tensions,” he said. “There are some arguments that should not be conceded because they’re just wrong.”

The panel was held on Thursday, Feb. 28, at 4:30 p.m. in Friend Center 101.

JULIAN ZELIZER AND ETTA RECKE / OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS

Zelizer and Kruse recently collaborated on a book, “Fault Lines.”

CONFESSIONS Continued from page 1

............. where people can comment/react so freely.”

In an effort provide support to suicidal students, Ty Ger lists the Suicide Prevention Hotline number (1-800-273-8255) and the SHARE link in the confession submission form.

“I have never reached out to OPs (Original Poster) before (aside from commenting on the actual post) because they remain anonymous,” Ty Ger wrote. “This can be distressing when someone submits something that indicates they’re in immediate danger.”

Though it prevents people from directly speaking to an OP, students feel that the anonymity of the platform has encouraged people to post about their struggles.

“The anonymity of the way certain things are posted can really allow certain people who would otherwise be uncomfortable sharing those experiences to come forward with them,” said Avner Goldstein ’21, a student who stays up-to-date with Tiger Confessions. “It’s really become a proliferation of people being honest about their challenges and thereby a lot more people being reached who share those challenges. I think for many it might be a good thing.”

Goldstein is a contributing columnist for the ‘Prince.’

Vicky Rideout, head of VJR Consulting, which researches youth and media, said that a platform like Tiger Confessions can provide a sense of empathy and connection.

“The platform itself has many qualities that are positive, and it has many qualities that have the potential to be really negative,” Rideout said. “I think one of the biggest positives for many young people in particular is being able to connect to other young people who are going through the same thing … people looking to find someone else who is experiencing the same kind of things they’re experiencing and to talk to them, to learn from their own peers — how do you handle the situation?

What do you do to make yourself feel better?”

Rideout said that, in her experience, social media often served as an outlet for those struggling with mental illness.

“In my research, I found that a lot of young people who are experiencing depression are actively trying to use social media … to help them deal with their feelings in a constructive way,” she added.

Posts on Tiger Confessions express interest in improving a person’s mental health and feature users reaching out to offer support and friendship for people that might feel lonely.

“I do think it’s helpful for strangers to comment and offer to hang out,” Ty Ger wrote. “I have faith that they’re genuine offers and those gestures can make a huge difference when you’re at your lowest point.”

Grace Collins ’21, a member of the Tiger Confessions group, frequently offers guidance to OPs. “On the one hand, it’s really unfortunate to see that this is so prevalent on our campus, that these sorts of issues plague so many of us and clearly a

lot of them are going unaddressed,” she said. “But on the other hand, every time you get one of those posts, you get a slew of people, three people who have this exact mental illness, two people who link you to CPS, and one person who says they’re down to chat.”

Collins sees Tiger Confessions as a way in which students can be connected to appropriate outlets.

“Having a peer, somebody else who has experienced the same thing that you are going through and has come out the other side of it or has tools to share with you about or who can connect you to resources — that just seems like a very good thing,” Collins added.

Ty Ger agreed with Collins’s assertion.

“For me, the number of posts on mental health related issues has helped me feel less alone and ashamed … for me it has been a mostly positive outlet,” Ty Ger wrote.

However, some students believe that Tiger Confessions is not the best solution for those struggling with mental health.

“With those very serious issues, if it’s a way to vent for them and that’s the relief they can get, it’s helpful,” Jeffrey Barzach ’22 said. “However, I feel like a much more beneficial method of solving those problems would be to actually seek help, rather than posting it onto this anonymous forum, and I think the amount of relief it does provide is very minimal compared to actually seeking help.”

In addition to questions around the efficacy of Tiger Confessions as an outlet, the page led students to question why so many University students are struggling with mental illness.

“It is unfortunate and really sad and probably telling about something about this university’s culture or expectations or something that so many of us have these sorts of issues that we’re going through, but it’s also good that it’s coming out on this forum that has shown itself to be a place where people can feel supported and reach out for help,” Collins said.

Users also comment on how University students could try harder to treat people with more respect.

On Jan. 3, one user wrote: “The steady transformation of this page into one where people are comfortable sharing really important/personal issues is so beautiful and encouraging, but it’s also incredibly concerning to me … a lot of the recent, frankly scary posts on here have made me realize that I just haven’t been there enough for those close to me.”

Though the prevalence of posts about mental health might surprise some students, interviews and the persistent use of the forum show that students find Tiger Confessions to be a helpful outlet for many in the student body. However, as Ty Ger wrote, “Just know that Tiger Confessions isn’t the only option if you want to talk to someone about these things.”

The University’s Office of Communications and Counseling and Psychological Services declined to comment on Tiger Confessions.

Friday March 1, 2019

The Daily Princetonian

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Karakatsanis combats surveillance, death penalty, ‘human caging’ Q&A

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communities who are directly impacted, and to work with journalists, artists, incarcerated people and their families, and be part of a more holistic social movement to change the way that we think about human caging, rather than just bringing a few discrete legal cases.

So that’s what led me to start Civil Rights Corps and to be a civil rights lawyer. Over the last five years since I’ve been doing this kind of work, I’ve been focusing on how lawyers can bring innovative and rigorous civil rights cases, but how they’re also part of and situated in a movement to change the way our society thinks about human caging. Now we are up to 23 staff members, so it’s a much different operation than when I was working in my bedroom.

DP: What was it like to start the organization?

AK: The first organization I started was called Equal Justice Under Law, but then, for a variety of reasons, the lawyers from that organization and I ended up splitting off and starting Civil Rights Corps. When we started Civil Rights Corps in 2016, there were actually seven of us. We were all in two little rooms, we were all in the same group text thread, and it was a very intense, almost family-like, environment that fostered a lot of deep relationships. We were all doing so many things.

We didn’t really have any administrative staff at the time, and so it was like a start-up culture. Then slowly we built up the staff. We hired more lawyers, more investigators, more administrative staff, more people in leadership positions. We hired a Director of Litigation. We hired a CEO. We ended up building a really strong, vibrant organization.

DP: What is different about your current work from your previous work experience?

AK: You have a very different role when you’re a public defender. Your job is to represent your client and do what’s in your client’s interests. One of the facts that’s often not discussed about the criminal punishment bureaucracy is, because of the sheer volume of the cases that it has to process in its mass assembly line, it pits the interests of arrested and incarcerated people against each other because it couldn’t possibly process all of those cases, it couldn’t take all those cases to trial, and it couldn’t have enough lawyers for all those cases. It forces you as a public defender to take plea deals and advise your clients to take plea deals that you think are morally wrong.

If everybody collectively acted to reject the plea deals, it would be better for everybody, but it’s in any one person’s given interest in a particular case to take the deal, so it’s actually very difficult to think in any systemic change kind of way.

You’re very focused on the human being in front of you and the legal system is designed that way to keep criminal defendants and their representatives from organizing together for big system change.

That’s a significant limitation of that kind of work.

So your job isn’t really to think about radical changes to the system. Your job is to think about the human beings that are right in front of you, and that of course is incredibly powerful and has changed my life, having those relationships and being in those situations, but it also has a number of limitations if you’re interested in really taking apart these systems and the oppression that they represent in any kind of more systemic way.

DP: What are your proudest accomplishments?

AK: I don’t think I have just one that sticks out to me as a particularly proud accomplishment. One moment

that’s on my mind a lot these days is the case that we won for Mr. Kenneth Humphrey in California, in which we struck down, in his case, the way that the California money bail system functions. I have been thinking about that a lot because the case is currently on appeal in the California Supreme Court, and we are waiting for the court to send us our argument date. If we win that case, it could affect the way that hundreds of thousands of arrestees are treated in California every single year and have an enormous effect on the cash bail system nationwide.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how just a few days ago we implemented the reforms that we won as a result of our lawsuit in Harris County, Texas, which is the Houston Metropolitan area. In that case, there will probably be about 19,000 people every year who are released from jail as a result of those reforms, fundamentally altering the way that the cash bail system has worked.

Another case that sticks out a lot to me is the challenge that we’ve filed to the privatized probation system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, where we got a $14.3 million settlement on behalf of about 25,000 people who have been jailed and threatened with jail and had money extorted from them by this private company who had signed a contract to become the probation department for this town in Tennessee and had been using that position, along with the county, to extort money from people to fund the company’s profits and the local criminal system.

We’ve brought cases like all of those all around the country, so no case in particular sticks out as any more or less important than the others.

But those are ones that have been on my mind the last few days as I have been working on them.

DP: What are the greatest challenges to your work?

AK: I think this work is just so hard because there are a lot of entrenched interests in our society that want to see the current criminal punishment system stay the way that it is. It’s serving very important interests in our society who benefit from the use of the criminal punishment system to keep poor people and people of color under government control, and can make money off of their caging and surveillance. These forces are extraordinarily powerful and they find new ways of reproducing the same injustices. As soon as you think that you’ve won some victory against them, they find another way of basically reproducing that same injustice. They’re relentless in their attempts to use the criminal punishment system to oppress people. That’s been a huge challenge, and it will continue to be a huge challenge.

DP: On the Civil Rights Corps website, and also in the way you talk about these issues, I have noticed some key terms being repeated. Can you speak to the role of terminology in your work?

AK: How we use language is incredibly important because it’s connected to how we think. It’s no accident that if you read a police report, or the report of a probation or parole officer, it has certain characteristics. It’s designed to minimize the humanity of the people they’re talking about. Police reports are very different from poems, for example. The language of a police state, the language of fascists, is very different from the language of humanity. It’s only by erasing people’s humanity that we’re able to cage them under such grotesque circumstances, that we’re able to treat their bodies in the way that we’ve been treating them. For us, part of our work consists in resensitizing the people who work in the

legal system and the public at large to the brutality of what we’re doing every single day, and it’s very important to use language in that way.

For example, there’s a reason that the federal government calls its prosecution agency the Department of Justice. It’s trying to convey something very Orwellian. It’s a marketing slogan. It’s trying to communicate that what it’s doing, or what it’s trying to do, is justice. That’s the same reason they changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense.

These are all very intentional decisions on behalf of elite power structures to tell a certain story about what they’re doing and why. At the same time, it’s very important for us to tell our own story about what these systems are doing and why.

DP: The talk you gave yesterday through the Woodrow Wilson School was called the Bureaucracy of Human Caging. Can you unpack that title?

AK: I think if nothing else is true about the criminal system, in order to accomplish such an unprecedented level of human caging, a level that no country in the recorded history of the modern world has even attempted — 12 million times every single year handcuffs are put on people’s bodies and they’re arrested, there’s 2.3 million human beings in cages right now as you and I are doing this interview — you have to create a mammoth bureaucracy.

You have to have people who arrest people, people who make the handcuffs, the sirens, and make the bulletproof vests, and the police cars. You have to have people processing those arrests, and you have to have people as their lawyers, clerks, prosecutors, and judges. Then you have to have probation officers, jail guards, and correction officers. Then you have to have people serving the food in all of those facilities and making all the products that are used in those facilities, and pretty soon you have mil-

lions of people who depend for their livelihood on the perpetuation and metastasization [sic] of this bureaucracy.

Like any large government or other bureaucracy, there’s a lot of inertia to changing it, eliminating it, and dismantling it. It’s very important that people understand that what we’re dealing with is a giant government and corporate bureaucracy much like other bureaucracies in our society.

Those types of systems have their own logic and their own way of functioning, and it’s often antithetical to our values in terms of human liberty.

It’s a pretty incredible achievement for that bureaucracy, though, to transfer so many bodies from their homes, families, schools, churches, jobs, and communities into cages.

We can’t forget how efficient that bureaucracy is and how so many of its aspects are designed for it to be evermore efficient.

DP: Do you have any advice for students who might be interested in getting involved in your line of work?

AK: I think the first piece of advice is to expose yourself to as many different kinds of people and experiences as you can in the system and listen to the people who have directly experienced the system because more than anyone else, they understand the harm that it causes. Get involved in any way that you can with working with people who are directly impacted.

Secondly, I think you have to understand that this system was created to serve certain very powerful interests in our society. So in order to change that system, it’s not enough to identify the problems that are resulting from it in the same way that it’s not enough to identify that there are problems with climate change. We very much know that there are problems with the criminal punishment system like there’s a problem with climate change. But it’s a question of power. Our ability to do anything about it is fundamentally going to come down to

whether we organize enough people to come together and demand something different.

So, like any big social problem, it’s going to require ordinary people, led by the people who are most directly affected by these systems, to organize together and to fight against it. I would encourage people to get involved locally with people in their communities who are organizing against these systems.

Third, we should be focused on changes to the system that shrink the size of the bureaucracy and that reinvest money that we have been spending on policing, incarceration, prosecution, and investing in communities that need resources and investing in them in ways that build power through things like workerowned co-ops where formerly incarcerated people can own the businesses that they are working in, through things like community land trusts, where communities can have control over their land and their property, and we can democratize control over both the workplaces and neighborhoods, that, in both realms, a lot of mass incarceration is being driven by inequality, and by a lack of power that goes along with not having economic resources, and the way in which control over capital and land has furthered white supremacy.

I think it’s very important for students getting involved in these issues to think on that kind of macro-scale about how these systems all function together. The criminal punishment system is not some silo.

The injustices in that system are deeply connected to the injustices in the way that our neighborhoods look, and the way that ownership of capital and land looks in our society, and the healthcare system, and the way that our schools look. All these systems are connected to each other. You need to develop a really coherent political framework for understanding how each of these systems is connected to each other.

Friday March 1, 2019

Sports

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{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } WOMEN’S BASKETBALL

Women’s basketball to conclude busy stretch against Dartmouth, Harvard

By Alissa Selover

Associate Sports Editor

After a win against Penn (18–5 overall, 8–2 Ivy) that tied the team for first in the Ivy League, Princeton women’s basketball (16–9, 8–2) head coach Courtney Banghart decided to treat her team.

For the first time in her 12 years of coaching, Banghart took the team to get ice cream after a game.

The Tigers defeated Penn 68–53 in a rare Tuesday Ivy League game at the Palestra.

Penn scored the first basket of the night, giving the Quakers the only lead that they would have for the rest of the game, before sophomore Carlie Littlefield hit a threepointer that put the Tigers ahead 3–2. With half of the first quarter left to play, a three by senior guard Gabrielle Rush and two free throws by junior Bella Alarie put the Tigers up 8–4. After some back-and-forth scoring, another Rush threepointer put Princeton up by seven before two consecutive baskets by the Quakers led to a 15–12 Ti-

ger advantage at the end of the first quarter.

Throughout the second quarter, the Tigers never had more than a eightpoint lead. After some back-and-forth baskets, the Tigers pulled away for a short period of time with senior Sydney Jordan adding a basket, followed by another three

by Rush to put the score at 24–15 with six minutes left. The Quakers went on a five-point run, sitting at only one point behind the Tigers with four minutes left in the half. The half finished with the Tigers up 33–31.

Two minutes into the second half, Alarie had gone on a six-point run, extending the lead to 39–31. Alarie contributed 13 points during this quarter, and out of the 10 made shots for the Tigers this quarter, Alarie contributed eight of them. The Tigers headed into the fourth quarter with a 50–46 lead.

With six minutes left in the game, the Tigers had a 10-point lead after two layups from Alarie in 50 seconds. The Tigers only allowed one threepoint shot and four free

throws, totaling in seven points from the Quakers in the fourth. With 5:30 left in the game, the lead that the Tigers had never fell below 11.

Alarie contributed a game-high 33 points to the score with Littlefield scoring 14 and Rush sitting at 13. The Tigers had 41 rebounds and shot a .431 field goal percentage during this win.

“The defensive lockin in terms of personnel and action was on point for the entire game and offensively, we did the big things like bouncepassing and attacking from the baseline,” Banghart said in her podcast, The Court Report.

The team will be wrapping up its stretch of five games in eight days this weekend. The Tigers will be facing Harvard (14–9, 7–3) and Dartmouth (12– 11, 5–5) in Jadwin Gymnasium on Friday and Saturday.

In their last matchup this season against Dartmouth on Feb. 16, the Tigers won 82–75. Coming into this game, Princeton will need to watch out for Dartmouth senior Isalys Quinones, who had 22 points and

six rebounds against the Tigers. Princeton shot lower percentages in each category than Dartmouth, with field goal percentage for the Tigers at .466 and the Big Green at .509, three-point percentage at a low .273 compared to Dartmouth’s .563, and free throws at .733 for the Tigers and .909 for the Big Green.

Princeton racked up 34 rebounds compared to the 27 from Dartmouth, so the Tigers will need to get their statistics up for this game and continue to beat Dartmouth in getting boards.

On Feb. 15, the Tigers played Harvard, winning by a slim four points, 75– 71. With the Tiger’s defense on fire for the second half, the Tigers were able to secure a lead. The team statistics for both the Tigers and Crimson were extremely similar.

Since losing to Princeton, Harvard has won three straight games, scoring an average of 87 points per game. They are currently 13th in the nation for three-pointers. Crimson sophomore Katie Benzan is ranked fourth in the NCAA in threes per game.

Coach Banghart explained, “Dartmouth is not an easy out by any stretch, and then you’ve got Harvard who has a lot to play for. Two tough teams and I guess this is how it goes.”

“We’re doing a lot of film right now and a lot of recovery stuff,” Banghart said of the team playing five games in eight days, “The more rest, the better for these bodies right now. We just gotta take care of ourselves and win one at a time.”

Prior to the game against Harvard on Saturday, the Princeton seniors — Rush, Jordan, and Qalea Ismail — will be honored. Together, this trio has won 79 games with a .692 winning percentage. They won the 2018 Ivy League Championship and were a part of the first team in conference history to receive an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament.

The match against Dartmouth will be at 6 p.m. on Friday, and the match versus Harvard will be on Saturday at 5 p.m. If you cannot attend, both games will be streamed on ESPN+.

JACK GRAHAM / THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

For the first time, head coach Courtney Banghart took the team to get ice cream after a game.

Opinion

Friday March 1, 2019

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{ www.dailyprincetonian.com }

The cruelty and tragedy of Michael Jackson Samuel Aftel

Managing Editor

I

n the new HBO documentary “Leaving Neverland,” two men, Wade Robson and James Safechunk, allege that the late pop megastar Michael Jackson molested them as young boys. The documentary was released at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 31 and will be airing on HBO on March 3 and 4.

Robson and Safechunk’s horrific accounts of abuse join a series of other allegations of sexual misconduct against Jackson, who died in 2009.

In 1993, the Los Angeles Police Department investigated Jackson for pedophilic sexual abuse; no criminal charges were brought. A second investigation, following an explosive documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia that aired on ABC in 2003, led to Jackson’s indictment for child molestation, serving alcohol to a minor, conspiracy, and kidnapping. He was ultimately acquitted of all charges.

Still, the Jackson allegations are a tough pill for our culture to swallow.

Jackson was one of the most inf luential American artists of all time and perhaps singlehandedly reoriented mainstream American music from rock and roll to pop.

Needless to say, Jackson’s music is still ubiquitous,

regularly played on popular radio and incessantly streamed on digital platforms.

Throughout my life, I have religiously listened to Jackson, and during each anniversary of his death, I nostalgically indulge in the mythos of the King of Pop and listen to radio stations blast “Thriller,” “Beat It,” and “Billie Jean,” from sunrise to sunset, celebrating the life of an apparently artistic superhuman.

Yet, of course, this superhuman was also an alleged pedophilic abuser.

In retrospect, Jackson always seemed to exist in a curious moral and sociocultural liminal space. He straddled blackness and whiteness, femininity and masculinity, queerness and straightness, decency and brutality. The duality of Jackson’s identity is, in part, what made him great.

But this duality was also a mechanism for deception.

In other words, we saw what we wanted to see in Jackson; and seeing Jackson as a pedophile was, for a long time, unthinkable.

We deluded ourselves, believing Jackson’s irresistible, soul-affirming music exonerated him from moral accountability and exonerated us for reliably looking the other way.

It also seems that Jackson deceived himself as much as he deceived us.

Perhaps Jackson, much like his fans, couldn’t admit his cruelty and abuse to himself, much less the world. Perhaps Jackson consciously constructed a moral liminal space to avoid internally con-

fronting the paradox of his softness and barbaric violence. Perhaps Jackson’s profound, worldhistorical fame was just as blinding to him as it was to us.

Furthermore, it must noted that Jackson was reportedly abused as a child — when he and his siblings formed the Jackson 5 band — by his maniacal father, Joe Jackson. As The Guardian explains, “[Joe Jackson] would beat [his children] with a belt buckle or the cord of an electric kettle, or make them spend hours carrying cinder blocks from one side of their garden to the other when they incurred his wrath.”

The singer also allegedly endured multiple plastic surgeries and skin-bleaching to be white-passing. Undoubtedly, Jackson was a troubled soul, tortured by unshakeable inner demons and eternally scared from a childhood of violence and an adulthood of suffocating fame.

Hence, Jackson likely committed unspeakable evil, but I don’t think he was a fundamentally evil human being. On the contrary, to me, he was a fallen person who at once survived and perpetuated senseless cruelty — someone at once victimized by and exploitative of a broken world.

The elemental moral contradictions of Jackson’s life raise impossibly difficult questions about his historical legacy. For those us who study and research cultural history, and who may very well write on the life of Jackson at some point in

our academic careers, how do we reconcile Jackson’s impact with his alleged abuse? Should our research emphasize his musical greatness or his apparent pedophilia — or must it emphasize both?

Does historicizing Jackson as a brilliant artist distract from the harm he has done?

In reality, separating the art from the artist — that is, dislodging Michael Jackson the alleged predator from Michael Jackson the moonwalker — is a fool’s errand. To say that art is wholly external to its creator is to render art arbitrary and meaningless. To say that Jackson’s alleged predation is sufficiently isolated from his work erroneously strips his music of interiority and individuality. It’s naïve to think that Jackson consciously turned off his darker sides when he made music; in fact, his music was, at times, demonstrably inspired by his obsession with children.

So, is it immoral to embrace Jackson as a musical genius — through our scholarship and through our earbuds — even if we condemn his depravity?

I’m not sure; regardless, I think we must conceptualize Jackson’s music as a lens into a deeply troubled, abused, and abusive soul.

At the very least, as we’re singing along to “Thriller,” we should cast no allusions about the character of the man behind the mic.

Samuel Aftel is a junior from East Northport, N.Y. He can be reached at saftel@ princeton.edu.

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{ www.dailyprincetonian.com } WOMEN’S HOCKEY

No. 7-ranked women’s hockey hosts St. Lawrence to begin ECAC tournament

By Owen Tedford

Senior Staff Writer

This weekend, the No. 7 women’s hockey team (18–6–5 overall, 15–4–3 ECAC) will begin its ECAC playoff journey with a best-of-three series against fifth-seed St. Lawrence (14–13–7, 9–7–6) at Hobey Baker Rink. The format for this tournament is to take the top eight of 12 teams from the conference ranked on points earned in conference games, with two points awarded for a win, one for an overtime loss, and none for a loss in regulation.

The quarterfinals are all best-of-three series at the higher seed, and then the semifinals and finals are single elimination hosted by the highest remaining seed. The teams in the tournament (in seed order) are Cornell, Colgate, Clarkson, Princeton, St. Lawrence, Harvard, Quinnipiac, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The win-

ner of the tournament will get one of four automatic bids to the NCAA tournament, while the other four teams will be filled by four at-large bids.

In Princeton’s matchup, the series has seen two incredibly tight games this season. In the first game, the Tigers won at home on an overtime goal from first-year forward Maggie Connors in the last four seconds.

In the second game this season, played last Saturday, Princeton lost on the road 2–0 in a game that was 0–0 entering the third period and was 1–0 until an empty-net goal by the Saints sealed the game in the last 30 seconds.

One trend for this series so far has been the Tigers’ lighter-than-usual offensive pressure against St. Lawrence. In the first matchup, they were outshot by a wide margin, and in the second game, they only had 18 shots on goal, compared to their

season average of nearly 40. The expectation was that Princeton would up this offensive pressure coming in to the second game, but it was not able to. Head coach Cara Morey, a nominee for ECAC Coach of the Year, will have likely made this a focus over the past week of practice. The Tigers also ended their season on a three-game losing streak, while the Saints are on a three-game unbeaten streak.

Other major storylines in the quarterfinals include the stellar play of late by RPI goalie Lovisa Selander, who will be facing one of the nation’s hottest teams in No. 4 Cornell, the overall first seed. Selander has the third highest save percentage (.940) in the nation and is the NCAA’s all-time leader in career saves with 4000. However, in the two matchups this season, Cornell has dominated, both winning the first contest 5–0, and the second last

weekend 8–2. Selander allowed five goals in both of these games, so perhaps Cornell is one of the few teams that has figured out how to get the puck past her.

Elsewhere, No. 5 Clarkson, the third seed, will try to capture its third consecutive conference postseason title when it hosts Quinnipiac. In the regular season, Clarkson won the first meeting 3–2 before they tied 1–1 in the second matchup this past Saturday. The Golden Knights have played a lot of minutes over the last few weekends, playing overtime in four of their last five games.

Quinnipiac has ended the season on a six-game unbeaten streak. One interesting relationship here is that former Bobcat T.T. Cianfarano is now a graduate transfer playing for Clarkson and has 33 points with 18 goals and 15 assists this season. She was a big part of Quinnipiac’s run to the ECAC title that included a win

over the Golden Knights 1–0 for the conference title.

Lastly, when No. 9 Colgate hosts Harvard, this will be the third time in four years that the two teams have played in the ECAC Quarterfinals. In the season series, Colgate won both games — 1–0 and 4–2 — a performance they will look to as they move on to the semifinals. Colgate also comes into this game scorching hot, winning its last five games, including an overtime win at Clarkson.

Princeton’s games will be played at 6 p.m. on Friday, 3 p.m. on Saturday, and, if necessary at 3 p.m. on Sunday. For those unable to make the trip, the games will be streamed online on ESPN+ for those in the United States. For those abroad, there is a link on the GoPrincetonTigers.com website to access a stream. There will also be live updates available on the Princeton women’s hockey Twitter (@PWIH).

SHELLEY M. SZWAST / GOPRINCETONTIGERS.COM

Sarah Fillier and Princeton will take on St. Lawrence in the ECAC quarterfinals this weekend.

Tweet of the Day “Congrats Claire Thompson - a finalist for the @ecachockey Defenseman of the Year! #EarnYourStripes” Princeton Hockey (@PWIH)

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