Encoding Race

This chapter uses political cartoons and ethnographic interviews to document the racialized depiction of Indian IT workers. These sources show the multifaceted nature of the discussion of race in public. Indian programmers are ambivalent subjects between Turkish guest workers and Afro-German migrants in German national debates around immigration and assimilation. Comparing these images and their narratives with the production of difference in the office, this chapter demonstrates how office culture uses liberal, tolerant notions of race even while it sediments office hierarchies through folk theories of cultural difference. It argues that postgenomic uncertainty over whether race is a fixed or malleable property of human populations makes race newly important in assessing the equally uncertain futures that neoliberal capitalism promises for working populations, especially those from elsewhere.

This chapter uses ethnographic observation in corporate offices and interviews with programmers and managers from India, Germany, Australia, and the United States to show how race is refracted and reimagined through evaluations of worker quality. It explores the ways that race is deployed around cognitive work, arguing that it is a means of dividing office work into skilled “front room” and grunt “back room” coding. Firms simultaneously pay attention to race as a source of information on foreign populations of potential customers and to evaluate the desired traits of future cognitive workers. In a postracial office, race is denied as a salient factor in decision making through an emphasis on work quality, even while worker quality is attributed to race. This chapter explores the multiple ways that race is made meaningful in such an environment.