This is such a complicated question because it puts Lincoln under a presentist scope of race relations. To answer your question as directly as possible, yes, Lincoln was racist by today's standards. To go a little beyond that, he wasn't even at the forefront of "progressive race relations" at the time as he was skeptical of abolitionists (even after the war began). People locate the Emancipation Proclamation as the moment in which he had a change of heart, but there is evidence that he held onto his colonization ideas after 1863 (see Colonization after Emancipation, by Phillip Magness and Sebastian Page) and that probably reflects a certain discomfort with the idea that whites and blacks could theoretically coexist in a post-war America.

Now, does that put Lincoln on the same level as Southern white exceptionalists? Definitely not. He didn't support slavery (and was opposed to its spread), although one could ask whether this was primarily for moral or economic reasons (some say Lincoln supported colonization for policy reasons and not because of principle, but Magness does a good job of pushing back against that theory). This article is a good primer on this question, and although not perfect will hopefully lead you in the right direction. Just remember when you read stuff about Lincoln -- the hagiography of Lincoln in this country makes it so that many historians will want to give him the benefit of the doubt on many of these questions, but that doesn't mean that the opposite is always true. Like all people, he was a complicated man, so we should assume neither the worst or the best of him.