I want to follow up Jesse’s excellent post on this ridiculous tide of people pretending that there’s legitimate, unresolved questions about intelligence differences between black and white people as groups, and I want to continue teasing out something Jill picked up on. The defenses of Stephanie Grace from the likes of Eugene Volokh and others—-and her own email—-are a classic example of what skeptics like to call “JAQ-ing off”. Ironically, I just was dealing with a cruder, stupider version of this from Jill Stanek and the other folks claiming that aborted fetuses in vaccines cause autism. But because the people that are “Just Asking Questions” about whether or not black people are stupider are more sophisticated, it might be hard to see that they’re doing the same thing to the same effect as the fetuses-in-vaccines nutters, which is making ridiculous, unscientific claims while pretending to be interested in scientific inquiry.
A refresher on what “JAQ-ing off” means:
JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of “Just Asking Questions”.[1] The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners’ views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are “just asking questions”, albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general.
I would definitely say that the people JAQ-ing off on the “question” of intelligence here are denialists, and what they’re denying is the historical turn towards a progressive, humanitarian, and not coincidentally more scientifically sound understanding of our common humanity. Like most denialists, they eagerly ignore the mounds of evidence that the questions they’re claiming to raise have been settled beyond a shadow of a doubt, because they’re not really raising questions. They’re lobbing accusations. Volokh’s bad faith might be hard to smell since he buries it in a pseudo-sophistication that no doubt took him years of wanking off to cultivate, but his work is showing all over the place. Like here:
One absolutely should not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Likewise, to give examples involving three groups I myself belong to, one absolutely should not rule out the possibility that Jews are (say), on average, genetically predisposed to be more acquisitive, or more loyal to their narrow ethnic group than to broader groups, or that whites are genetically predisposed to be more hostile to other racial groups, or that being nonreligious is genetically linked, and that people who have those genes are genetically predisposed to be more likely to commit crime or cheat on their spouses or what have you.
Note what questions he doesn’t entertain. Like Jesse said, he doesn’t entertain the possibility that whites could be less intelligent. But he also doesn’t ask this question of Jews, even though historically this accusation has been lobbed and was part of the justification for the Holocaust. Which in turn leads me to believe that Volokh’s stated willingness to entertain “hard” questions about himself and his people is just a put-on.
JAQ-ing off crops up a lot when the conspiracy theorists/denialists in question are trying to refute a giant wad of evidence against their claim that basically settles the question beyond any reasonable doubt. Creationists dwell on what they considered unanswered questions about evolution. Holocaust denialists, 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, you name it—-they all hide by saying, “I’m not saying for sure, I’m just asking questions,” as if the answers weren’t readily available. And that’s what Volokh does here: