In Part I, we uncovered the manufactured origins of standardized testing through Carl Brigham’s eugenicist lens, tracing how the SAT was never designed to measure pure intellect, but rather to uphold a racial and class-based hierarchy. These tests didn’t just determine college admissions– they shaped who would be invited into the American Promise and who would be systematically excluded. Now, in Part II, we zoom out to examine the broader architecture of exclusion that testing helped reinforce. As we peel back the language of fairness, we expose a system built not to elevate potential but to preserve privilege.
What the language of “merit” hides is the deeply organized and systemic effort to disenfranchise Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), poor people, immigrants, and others from full and equal participation in education and society. This is not just about the SAT or ACT. It’s about unequal school funding based on property taxes. It’s about redlining, school segregation, and the school-to-prison pipeline. It’s about how students from under-resourced communities often have fewer Advanced Placement (AP) courses, outdated textbooks, and lower-paid teachers. When the system is already rigged, calling the outcome “merit-based” is dishonest at best– and deeply harmful at worst. Standardized tests measure familiarity with the dominant culture – its language, values, and ways of thinking – more than raw intelligence. Students who grow up immersed in that culture are more likely to succeed on these tests, while others are penalized for not having the same exposure. The tests don’t measure potential; they measure privilege.
So what happens when access to opportunity is shaped by tools designed to keep certain people out? The result is a “permanent underclass” – a population deliberately denied upward mobility. Brigham’s work wasn’t an error in judgment; it was a calculated move to uphold a racial hierarchy. The early architects of these systems wanted to sort people – not just to identify talent, but to maintain social order.
Although Carl Brigham recanted his earlier work, the system he helped design lives on. The SAT and ACT became cornerstones of college admissions, restricting access to elite education for generations. Even as some universities shift to test-optional policies, the cultural weight of standardized scores still looms large. We see its impact on racial disparities in test scores. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Black and Latino students consistently score lower on average than their white and Asian peers– not because of lesser ability, but because of systemic barriers: underfunded schools, biased curriculum, test prep disparities, food insecurity, and generational trauma. Add to that the emotional toll – the internalized pressure to “prove” one’s worth through a test designed to discriminate – and the result is damaging in the extreme. For many BIPOC students, this test doesn’t just measure academic ability; it becomes a psychological referendum on belonging.
Standardized testing is one part of a broader architecture of exclusion. The students who score highest on these tests are often tracked into gifted programs, honors classes, and elite college admissions pipelines. From there, they access social capital: internships, alumni networks, fellowships, and eventually leadership roles in law, medicine, finance, and politics. This is how the “cognitive elite” maintains power. But the term is deceptive. It suggests that intelligence alone drives access, when in fact, it’s intelligence plus a host of unspoken privileges: generational wealth, legacy status, racial identity, and social grooming. The result is a society where opportunity masquerades as merit, and discrimination is coded into spreadsheets and score reports.