Anyone who's been paying attention, at least in the USA over the last 10 years, and who has been trying to tackle the issue of racism in good faith, has encountered the issue of "unconscious bias." Sure, "the heart wants what it wants" is another way of saying this, but there is no reason for any sane person to believe that they have not internalized unconscious messages about race, or skin color or whatever, as it relates to a person's inherent desirability.

So the answer to your question - is this racism - is "Yes," and it's not a very interesting answer. The question is, what to do? It turns out that "Make a conscious effort to eradicate this behavior" is not particularly good advice when it relates to unconscious bias; indeed it's a contradiction in terms. Besides, most progressives have had a bellyful of authority figures telling us whom to love - telling gay men that they need conversion therapy to be straight, for instance, most folks agree that's a non-starter now.

What helped me as I wrestled with this particular topic was to realize that I - to reference a pronoun that showed up in your question - I am a person, I have an identity, but the desires and beliefs and feelings I live with every day, those occur at a particular moment, and I really only have full access to them at the present moment. In fact, looking back over my life which has spanned 6 decades, some of those transient feelings, in arriving and departing, have reshaped and changed my identity and my core desires and beliefs. So I've learned to think, "This is what I find desirable today - this is what sexy is, to me, right now." Because from experience I've learned that I stand on a threshold - right on the cusp of changing from the man I used to be, into the pluripotential creature whom I may become tomorrow.

It's probably no coincidence that I (like many others) was first exposed to this viewpoint in its pure form in a novel by a gay science fiction author - Samuel Delany's Dhalgren. The book is an exercise in a lot of things, but one of them is subverting expectations about the future - not just the characters', but the reader's as well. You would enjoy it.