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Notes -
I mean, this really depends on the program in question. I agree that there are tons of programs for which these tests are not terribly predictive; even moreso when we consider individual components of such tests. My graduate program was pretty math-heavy. I spoke to multiple prospective departments, and they pretty much all didn't give a shit about the non-math parts of the GRE. And even then, it's hard to say that the math section was predictive of how you'd do once you got in, but this is because of how the math score was used. Basically everyone who was admitted had off-the-charts math scores; they only used the math score as a quick check, "Is there something off about this guy? Like, did they manage to get through some random university's undergrad program while avoiding math stuff or cheating their way through or something?" I wasn't actually part of those decision processes, so I'm not going to say that it would be impossible to get in if you only had a 700-or-whatever, but my sense was that if you only had a 700-or-whatever, they were going to go through extra steps to make sure that there wasn't something wrong and to ensure that you had some hope of actually being capable enough to succeed (and you better have a patron on the faculty who wanted you there).
In such cases, I would be shocked to see a department like that start admitting a bunch of, say, ~600 GRE math score students, of any race, for whatever weird political/non-political reason... and not have a meaningful, visible reduction in student quality that either leads to reduction of standards or significant failure rate. At the same time, I would be willing to bet that the non-math part of the GRE would be near useless in predicting how students perform in the program.
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