Your explanation of why socio-econimic status might be correlated with HIV makes sense. However I still think your dismissal of race as having independent expl

Your explanation of why socio-econimic status might be correlated with HIV makes sense. However I still think your dismissal of race as having independent explanatory power is wrong. For example, race has independent explanatory power in predicting crime rates, even after taking into account many other social and economic variable. This doesn't mean that skin color causes crime, e.g. there could be (and almost certainly are) very many social factors that are correlated with race but hard to measure objectively.