Was wondering about this. Studies show that certain behaviors are more (or less) common in different ethnic groups. One I noticed in school is that all Asian-American students I encountered studied harder than average. A talk with my dad, who is a sociologist, confirms that, statistically speaking, Asian students study harder than non-Asian students. Does this, perchance, mean that the SATs are biased towards Asiatic culture? Or, if a college accepted a large amount of Asian-American students, on the grounds that, statistically speaking, they were better qualified, would that be racist?
The simple answer to your question is that no, statistical correlation is not racism in and of itself; it’s simply a fact which may or may not be relevant to anything.
However, if you treat someone in a certain way because of said statistical correlation, then most likely, you’re being racist. It’s fine to accept a large amount of Asian-American students if they are in fact all qualified; it’s not fine to say “well, they’re Asian, so they must be qualified.”
It seems that it would be odd.
If you mean that the school admitted large groups of Asians in place of other groups without providing any admissions tests simply because the “odds” favored Asians being good students, the school would certainly get a lot of underachieving Asians to no purpose.
If you mean that following the raw scores simply happened to admit more Asians, I would not see any racism in that.
Racism would more likely be an aspect of the situation if someone claimed (as J. P. Rushton has) that Asians are “brainier” than any other group (what with being undersexed and all) and that Asians are genetically predisposed to study better, rather than looking at the culture in which they were raised and deducing why they tend to study more.