Hold up. This seems forced.
What would've driven this fellow to household recognition? Even his billionaire, surviving peer, Ed Catmull, and the commercial face of Pixar isn't a household name.
I don't think there's any reason to think Bùi's obscurity is due to any particular prejudice against Asian Americans.
This is indeed a bit forced.
I had heard of Bui Tuong Phong, Henri Gouraud, Ivan Sutherland, John Carmack, John Warnock, Martin Newell, and Nelson Max.
I hadn't heard of Arthur Appel, Dave Evans, David Immel, David Pearson, Edwin Catmull, Elizabeth Waldram, Frank Sinden, Fred Parke, James Clark, James Kajiya, Jim Blinn, Ken Knowlton, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Noll, Ralph Baer, Steve Russell, Tom Stockham, Verne Hudson, William Fetter, or William Higinbotham.
I haven't studied computer graphics, other than doing the Raytracing in One Weekend project.
(Oops, I missed people with accented, abbreviated, or uncapitalized names, like Pierre Bézier, David C. Evans, and Paul de Casteljau. I don't think this will change the ratio much, though.)
People don't know his life story just because he was the first to interpolate normals between the vertices of triangles for smooth shading and created an exponential falloff for a highlight.
If he didn't do that first, someone else would have done it pretty quickly after, but in the 70s 3D computer graphics was so niche there were only a few people in the world with access to enough memory to hold a single color image.
Also the title saying he made toy story possible is ridiculous clickbait. He had nothing to do with toy story and it came many years after his work.
Not only that toy story was done with renderman and curved patches that were broken down into pixel sized polygons with highlights that were probably similar to blinn, so it's actually an example of phong interpolation and shading not being used.
This is overall terrible journalism that makes distant connections to pop culture for clickbait.