[chaorace]

I think what the parent comment meant was that you could force the model to divert its attention elsewhere if you removed race as a variable by making the training data uniform in terms of race. I think it's a smart thought, though I doubt it'd work due to the fuzziness of "race" as a construct. Even if you grouped people using some combination of their self-classified and/or observed racial identity, the model would probably start identifying (and thus start cheating using) even subtler "sub-racial" biomarkers.

If you ask me, it's probably more effective to compensate for the model's learned racial bias using weights derived from the model outputs via statistical analysis.