Black Bloggers Identify Taser Nation

There has been a great deal of uninformed comment about the invisibility of African-American bloggers, mostly by white bloggers who don't trouble themselves to read the work of African-American bloggers. One area where black bloggers are way out in front of black bloggers is the increasing use of tasers as a torture device by American police. Here's Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report:

A country that employs torture as an instrument of national policy should be expected to do the same on the local law enforcement level. The reverse is also true. The United States, with its long legacy of subjecting society's "Others" to systemic violence, now elevates pain to a kind of universal principle, spreading torture and "rendition" as institutionalized components of its global offensive. Now the domestic legacy and foreign policy combine to trickle down upon previously immune white citizens, in the form of Taser-torture. Tasers, once defended as life-saving alternatives to police use of deadly force, have become weapons of arbitrary, sadistic choice. The circle of pain is complete.

The most prominent example of the "trickle down" of Taser torture to American whites is the incident of Utah policeman Jon Gardner zapping white motorist Jared Massey with 50,000 volts of electricity because Massey wouldn't sign a ticket for speeding that he wasn't legally required to sign anyway. The whole incident was captured on video and distributed on YouTube. The only thing that Massey was being to Officer Gardner was annoying. Yet, USA Today reported that the Utah Highway Patrol found Gardner's conduct to be "lawful and reasonable under the circumstances." In other words, the highway patrol is saying that Utah policeman have a right to torture anybody they want anytime they want unless the torture is even more egregious than what happened to Massey and captured on video.