I remember this. Everyone on the tech sites were trying to out outrage each other while pretending they had no idea how this could have happened. This was three years or so ago and, last I heard, Google Photos still won't recognize the words "Gorilla," "Monkey," or "Chimp."
The reasons for why are pretty simply. Humans are apes. Our bodies are apelike, but we lack the hair. However, apes tend to have different hair on their face that can be seen as no hair. If you take a human with dark skin and hair around their face, then the similarity between the two is high enough for computers to confuse the two.
tl;dr It's not racist; it's coincidence and computers.
tl;dr It's not racist; it's coincidence and computers.