Discrimination is a mindset. It can be turned on and off, and tuned to varying degrees of sensitivity to serve different ends. For many years of my life, I trained my powers of discrimination to distinguish subtle variations in dark chocolate, because that was crucial to my work. I’m not talking about coarse-grained differences like sweetness levels, but much finer nuances that only careful attention can pick up.
So in my chocolate world, my discriminating faculties were tuned to seek, amplify and exploit differences. When I thought about chocolates, it was those differences that came to mind. But I could turn that off, too. I could zoom back out, so to speak, from that micro-discrimination perspective and see that these differences were overlaid on an enormous body of commonality. I could look at these chocolates as, first and foremost, chocolate. From that perspective, it was apparent that 99% of the brute experience of chocolate was virtually the same among all of these.
I can understand how, as @Dr_Lawrence says, professionals who’s work involves looking at people on the level of fine-grained discrimination will tend to see the difference aspect in high relief. But I also think that it’s extremely important to be able to back away from that discriminating mindset at times and prioritize our vast commonality.