I don't think this is racist. Why do you think it is a negative thing? I'm Asian myself and I admire those who achieve. Way better than spending youth in BS activities.

I cannot stress hard enough how tired every sensible human being is of this kind of crimestop knee-jerk anti-contribution to discussions.

Stop working so hard to make the word racist useless. We need that word. Thank you.

"P(hard-work-pleasures | asian) >= P(hard-work-pleasures | ~asian)"

I'm not sure if that's true, but it's presumably what the other person was saying they observed. Though I think in casual conversation, the reality is that P(racism | <such a sentence>) is likely higher than "baseline", I'd prefer to give the benefit of the doubt on HN.

Also, much prefer a place where mentioning "race" doesn't immediate trigger strong reactions. "Race" being in quotations, because I think the original sentence has more to do with the culture of (certain parts of?) Asia rather than actual race.

A side analogy: I think that Asians are more likely to like Hello Kitty than non-Asians.

We Asians would take that as a compliment.