A school like Harvard admits rich people who are maybe 1 SD above the mean and poor people who are 3-4 SD above the mean.
It's a form of "achievement laundering". You might be 22 years old and the only remarkable thing about you is that your parents are rich (either they achieved something or their parents achieved something or got lucky or stole or...) You took classes that weren't graded harshly with some really bright kids, and for the benefit of both groups, rich kids and bright kids are blended together so that newspaper commentators and other pundits will look at them with 80/20 vision and think they are looking at a "meritocracy".
A threat to this is that some alumni families have a strong sense of entitlement and insist on their spawn with inferior IQ (and often inferior moral character in general) get admission.
Some of these children benefit a lot from test prep, some benefit a little, other ones can at best make up a story like "I must have skipped a row and put all the right answers in the wrong rows".
So there is a lot of hate for standardized tests and circa 1970-1980 somebody must have hired a public relations agency, done some polling, figured that you couldn't get sympathy for low-IQ rich kids but maybe you could get sympathy for low-IQ black people and that makes it a little easier for people like Stephen J. Gould to get funding to drop what they are doing and write on the topic of "racial bias in IQ testing".
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Effective political movements usually have a combination of an elite sector that supplies resources and a mass sector that supplies footsoldiers. The elite is too small to win at anything on it's own, and it is next-to-impossible for mass groups to organize in the long term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
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An interesting phenomenon is that you'll often see something in People magazine to the effect that "(Rosanne Barr|Sylvester Stallone|...) has a 148 IQ" and wonder who it is that trains celebrities to ace this this test:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
which is has to be, because with just 60 questions, somebody with an IQ > 100 or so should be able to memorize the answers. Maybe you can't really a fault an actor for this because an actor doesn't have to be a genius, they just have to play one on TV.