My English is limited so I'm not sure I understood this essay correctly but I think it says that one should treat every single person as a person and not as something else which is what I absolutely agree with.
In Ukraine the government, bloggers and journalists are trying to make people think Russians are basically no more than objects. If you try to share a different opinion on it there, you can get in serious trouble. It's a very big problem. Same with ultraconservative racists. You do not treat anyone as an object or anything else except for a human being, no matter the reason.
For example, I do not agree that alternative sexual orientations are normal/healthy but it doesn't mean I can treat people that (falsely) identify themselves as LGBT not human beings. In this case I consider it a disease so I should consider them not just as human beings but ones that need even more attention and care. Same goes to every person with a serious disease such as AIDS or schizophrenia (there are more causes of discrimination of them though).
The case of people with dark skin is even worse. I don't even know what is the reason of them being discriminated. What I know is some of my relatives think that dark skin is an indicator of a person with increased chance of becoming a criminal. This is prejudice (that is obviously bad and inhumane but also instinctive I guess). Some other people probably discriminate them just to keep themselves privileged or "to be like the crowd" idk.
In any given case, after some analysis, we can clearly see that discrimination is always an immoral and ultimately bad thing. However, the immorality of it can just have various, sometimes not obvious, forms in different cases.
What we should do is change our mentality to delete stupid discrimination from it. As civilized and intelligent beings we should just be "above it". This means we should think instead of simply using reactions (usually wrong ones) we already have. This can make us more resistant to evil propaganda and negative social trends, as well as help to delete already formed wrong things in our mentality too.
But tbh idk if this world can change. It's getting worse all the time and I'm very depressed because of it.