The challenge is that it’s very unlikely that race/socioeconomic factors are causal in and of themselves, the reason why you would adjust for those variables is because they are tightly correlated with other causal factors that aren’t being observed directly, e.g. poorer healthcare availability, poorer access to healthy foods, etc.

Environmental pollution very reasonably can be hypothesized to be a causal mechanism behind cancer rates. Exposure to which is going to be heavily correlated with race and socioeconomics.

I may be misinterpreting OP, but their statement came off as “cancer maps are just maps of where poor non white people live, so it’s not the pollution”, but you can’t just “control” for things that way. Given the fact that environmental pollution is a hazard, there’s a reason why that demographic lives there that makes the exposure to pollution not independent from the demographic characteristics of the population.