Saying "Asians are more intelligent" is absolutely, objectively racist, and also incorrect. It's the same as saying "Blacks are dumber than other races," the fact that it's a "good thing" is irrelevant.
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.
Both here and in the general western society, there's a vicious policing of certain taboo ideas about psychology, even ideas that are well accepted by the researchers. Being anti-science is seen as a good thing here because the truth might turn us all into Nazis! It reminds me of religious people who oppose education and scientific knowledge because it might weaken people's faith in God which would turn them into immoral criminals.
The scarier thing is that the researchers themselves are also subject to this policing, though with a little more leeway allowed. But they can still get ostracized for making the wrong findings and you get ridiculous cases where the published data from a study clearly shows the opposite of what the conclusion says because the authors are scared of punishment from their peers. In one case, an author openly admitted this was his reason after people were confused about the apparent contradiction.
At the individual level of course there is a huge genetic component to intelligence. Even with the perfect environment and all the money in the world you might just be a dummy.
But I'm not sure how you square the argument that intelligence is mostly genetic with population-level shifts in intelligence such as that of the Jewish-Americans that someone else brought up in this thread. The only thing I could see is those populations begin selecting for intelligence with regard to reproduction, but a couple hundred years is an extremely short period of time for something like that to happen at the population level if it's mostly genetic.
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.