Some of these correlate with race. But only part of the information correlates with race, not all of it. It is, in principle, possible to remove the information that identifies race without destroying the information that identifies the individual. It is true that part of an individual's essential characteristics are their racial characteristics, but it is not true that the only way to identify an individual is their racial characteristics. For instance, there is no way that i'm aware of to infer race from fingerprints, but you can absolutely identify a person by their fingerprints. So, the question is, can we extract a facial fingerprint that identifies a person, but not their race? I think the answer is almost certainly yes, and it is going to be up to a clever model design to do it. But essentially it would look like a GAN where the adversarial component is constantly trying to predict race, while the Generative component is trying to trick the race classifier without tricking the person-identifier.
Or perhaps they understand that this won't work in practice.
That's what the ethicists say: don't use facial recognition models. Don't work on them. Don't research them. They cannot be both unbiased and useful. And in general, there's few to no uses that are ethical, period.