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I think John Henry has a point - it's an essential function of human cognition to classify things. The mistake we make is in assuming that those classifications are somehow natural, inherent in the things that are labelled. We've made particular distinctions - race being one of them - that are kind of arbitrary. We could have classified all of humanity into tall and short, hairy and hairless, able to sing and not able to sing, but instead we chose white and not white, with all of the various ethnic and racial subclassifications that entails. There's so much information to process - not just in the "digital age" but just in basic survival - what's going on in your environment, is that thing dangerous or not? - that we have learned to make mental "shortcuts" to speed up the processing of information. We classify things, and then we don't have to think about that thing any more - instead of having to deal with objects (or people) on an individual basis, we learn the classifications and then the next time we encounter one of those, we go "I know this, this is X, and it's like 'this'". And we don't have to spend time assessing it.
While this tendency has some survival value, it also means you necessarily get an incomplete picture of the world because objects and people are never identical. Even if they share certain features, they still probably have more NOT in common. It's fine if all you have to know is "kills me" or "doesn't kill me" or "edible" or "not edible" but when you get into the nuances of living in society, it can be a real handicap for developing just and enlightened relations.
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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
- Anatole France
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