I'm afraid the 'asians are smarter, work harder and have better culture' makes a whole lot more sense.

Let's leave US and look at Asia instead - compare performance of Japan/Korea/Taiwan (can also through in Singapore and HK) and more recently China to other countries (Indonesia/Philippines/Malaysia/Thailand etc) post WW2. They all started out dirt poor yet some countries have made tremendous progress while others are still pretty undeveloped.