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In ‘Tiger King,’ White Victimhood Rears Its Ugly Head
I grew up near the Big Cat Rescue, and these people are more than comedy fodder
Growing up in Tampa, Florida, I knew Big Cat Rescue as the place diagonally across from Citrus Park Mall that my mom never felt safe taking our family to visit. It seemed like a throwback to old Florida roadside attractions, a bit of homespun danger at a fraction of the cost for a theme park ticket. The rescue is set back away from the main street connected by a tree-lined road that in my memory was thick enough to block out the Florida sun. Never would I have guessed that the Big Cat Rescue would be a major part of the latest Netflix sensation, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.
The seven-episode series follows the story of Joseph Maldonado-Passage aka Joe Exotic, an Oklahoma-based zoo owner whose eccentric and flamboyant personality earned him some local fame and notoriety when his many threats against his mortal enemy, Carole Baskin—who owns Big Cat Rescue—earned him serious jail time for attempted murder. There are other colorful characters in Tiger King, like Bhagavan “Doc” Antle, a cult-like leader in Myrtle Beach with a cadre of women who serve as his tiger trainers, and Mario Tabraue, the sole nonwhite big cat owner profiled in the series who is a Cuban American former drug trafficker. However, the series focuses on the rivalry of Carole and Joe, and invariably, the privileges that whiteness affords them.
Baskin weaponizes this appearance of an innocent and fragile white womanhood against accusations that she may have had a role in the disappearance of her second husband, Don Lewis.
Before they made headlines and trending hashtags, Baskin and Joe both grew up poor in different parts of the country — Texas and Kansas, respectively — and scrapped their way into a slice of the American Dream, owning their own small business: a zoo. From the outset, Joe Exotic does not look like the typical embodiment of Midwestern male norms. He often wears sequined shirts or leather fringed jackets or vests along with a gun in a holster and a mullet, an unholy cross between a cheap Vegas showman and a country singer…
