I disagree with your notion that discrimination is inhumane. Discrimination is a required filter to help our brains process the extremely complex world out there. Everybody discriminates, and there's no point in trying to fight that. Honestly, the only way to properly reduce a type of discrimination is to spend a large amount of time with the group that you're discriminating against.
Before going to Uni, I had all kinds of prejudices against Middle Easterners (mostly negative, I will admit), however, most of my new friends at Uni came from that part of the world, and those prejudices melted away. Similar thing happened when I emigrated to Hong Kong (though my prejudices weren't necessarily negative to begin with... basically, after moving to HK, I realised that there's as many fucking idiots and dolts here as there was back home, whereas I always had had this impression that Chinese were like these super-humans who could excel in anything that they do.*)
On one hand, sticking people of different races or whatever into games could help to "melt" that prejudice for some people. But, here's the thing: there ARE differences between people, and between groups of people. People are not random events, and they are molded by the culture that they grew up in. There's a habit in media to depict everybody as "normal" (ie, a straight, white person), no matter what race or sexuality they are, in a hope to be "politically correct". I don't think this is helpful at all, and, frankly, can be quite offensive in itself.
When looking at video games though, whether a character is gay or straight or a different race or whatever doesn't have that much impact on the overall game. Disability will effect the playable characters (sometimes awesomely.... I'm looking at you, Sly Trilogy), but no effect for the player for NPC's. If it makes some people out there feel better about themselves, to feel included, to see that in games, I don't see why not. I just very much doubt that they'll be an accurate representation, so don't expect it to be beneficial in "teaching" society.
* Actually, the difference is, their culture just celebrates the super talented far more than our culture does.
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