Disclaimer: I'm a history fan, not a historian and I"m talking out my ass here mostly.

Background: I grew up in Hawaii, which is about 40% asian, 10% pacific islander, and 25% white, with most of the rest being mixed race. I am now in semi-rural Alabama, which is ALMOST literally as different as you can get. (70% white, 25% black and a sneeze of other races.)

I'd guess in part that it comes down to a few basic facts:

1) Asians do not have dark skin. We don't seem to like dark skin unless it comes from tanning. (See also, the Native Americans)

2) Asians do not have a long, long history of being enslaved.

3) Japan had a big technology boom that, I suspect, lent a lot towards our appreciation of their capabilities and intelligence. After all, hard to hate someone when they're making your TV, your car, your gameboy, etc etc etc.

4) Blacks, on the other hand... just continued being oppressed into smaller and smaller areas while discrimination was supposedly made illegal, and yet jsut a few years ago I had a woman who was only a few years older than I (she was around 25?) tell me that "it wern't right" that a black boy and a white girl were flirting. and she KNEW both of them and LIKED both of them, but still "it weren't right" but she "wasn't racist".

and honestly, that's about it, in my biased opinion: Asians developed their own stereotypes and did their best to fight against them. They have a very strong sence of culture which tends to focus on getting good grades and a good job, while other minorities (blacks, Latino, Native Americans, etc) are told that no one expects anything from them and media would have us beleive that they're all worthless, and that they'll probably try and steal your shoes.

And tha'ts really the CORE of it. We say that a thing is true, so how can they fight against it? If you tell a kid that they're ugly, over and over, they'll believe it. They can't recover from systematic oopression and economic disparity because "we" won't let them.