I would encourage you to read a bit about human attraction from a biological research perspective. Olfactory attraction in particular, is quite important, it’s a major factor in both sexual attraction, general attraction and even influences fertility.
Olfactory attraction, sadly enough, if influenced by genetic relatedness and, as such, usually correlated with a phenotype such as skin color or eye elongation (which we usually label as “race”).
There’s actually studies done on olfactory attraction that signify that, on average, we are most attracted to our 2nd to 4th cousins (depending on your genes) based on smell.
Here’s some good peer-reviewed papers by doctors and biological researches that study the subject:
Alternatively you can get some idea of the mechanisms involved from simply reading wikipedia:
Why ? Well, it has to do with the basics of evolution. We’ve evolved so that the DNA of our offspring is as similar to our as possible, otherwise, we wouldn’t converge to be a single species. But, we hedge some of the risk of harmful recessive genes and genetic stagnation by allowing for some amount of divergence from our own DNA.
The sweet spot of that turns of to be somewhere around 3rd cousin. In recent years, however, a lot of humans in cities probably have mates that are 5 to 60 degrees separated from themselves (but such a thing is hard to study).
So people are likely to be attracted to individuals of one race or another (usually their own, but, not exclusively), simply due to genetic factors that they cannot control.
Things like the smell of someone, the sound of their voice and the way they look you in the eye are usually essential to love, or at least to the initial attraction. The factors that determine that are not rational, they are genetic.
TL;DR:
Get of that soapbox and READ the literature around the subject you want to rant about. Feel free to climb back on afterwards, if you feel like it.
