I don't really have a dog in this fight but as a response "Lots of people thought Koreans make terrible pilots" sort of ignores the fact that racism kinda by definition involves a widely held systematic bias.
I may have misunderstood the 2 posts. But I sort of understood that Gladwell was arguing that Korean cultural aspects, including the nature of the language, play(ed) a vital role in the airplane accidents.
And if that is the case, you could say that he is arguing that Koreans are bad pilots (Of course he is excluding Koreans who don't subscribe to the culture; but is that such a huge number?)
I probably completely misunderstood his original argument.
It's not as broad a generalization as you make it sound, but I still find Gladwell's cultural reasoning highly specious.
Gladwell goes out of his way to refute any racist interpretation here. ("Cultural explanations are sometimes wielded with the same blunt force as genetic explanations—and that is a huge mistake.")
I think it should be obviously clear that all cultures have their weak and strong points, and sometimes cultures should change and fix these problems. This is true for corporate cultures and cultures of whole nations.
How is the second idea different from "racism"? The "fix" part?
If we believe (and it's a legitimate belief) that "all cultures have their weak and strong points", then we can also find that a culture (A) has more weak points than another (B).
If A's weak points are far more, or are in the more important aspects of life, then, can't we say that "A is inherently inferior to B"? In this case, I wouldn't call it racism, but a fair assesment.
I'd rather stick with the old definition of racism: "the belief that some people (members of an ethnic group) are genetically inferior to others".