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Othering is identifying people by a characteristic that differs from some perceived normative state when irrelevant. ("Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self." Other (philosophy), c.f. intersubjectivity and Edmund Husserl.)
The process inherently involves diminishing the person being described as being somehow non-normal. While in writing it often feels "natural", the result is idiosyncratic, obscuring the facts being described.
In the following example, examples of othering are bolded:
Sid: A preschool student
Tom: Sid's classmate and best friend
Mae: A girl in Sid's class
Mitch: Sid's Asian classmate
Calvin: The Asian in Sid’s class
If their genders, races, etc. are relevant, Sid would be "A white boy in preschool". They aren't. Leave them out.
Alternate perspective: the characters are described in relation to Sid, the protagonist. A fellow student could easily be described as "A boy in Sid's class," so describing Mae as "A girl in Sid's class" is not necessarily othering. Additionally, representation of minorities is important, and mentioning the race of a character may serve a valuable purpose towards representation. Leaving that information out would erase that.
As an example, prior to my edits here, the only human characters in this cartoon were Gabby, "a girl" and AJ, who is "Filipino". Why not Gabby, who is white and AJ, who is a boy? Because of the baseless assumption that white and male are somehow defaults or "normal", though women/girls outnumber men/boys and whites are a minority of the world's population.
Alternate perspective: since it is an American cartoon and refers to American culture, the demographics of world population are not particularly relevant. White people are a majority of the American population. More importantly, a numerical majority is not the same as a political majority, and due to the power structures in American society, it is not "baseless" to point out that white and male are commonly seen as normal, and it is valuable to confront that through representation. Removing "Filipino" from a description erases the attempt to increase representation and show more character diversity.