It has become commonplace to regard the high-tech and creative industries as part of a new cosmopolitan wave in which difference is not just tolerated but welcomed, and many have argued that diversity is at the foundation of its success (Saxenian, 1999).

However, one study takes the archetypical post-ethnic world of the software industry in west coast US (Reitman, 2006) and holds it up to scrutiny. Meredith Retman argues that the vaunted multiculturalism of these ‘creative class’ businesses is based upon the laid back and very liberal, but nevertheless unyielding, assumption that the accepted codes of behaviour and cultural values for all the black, brown, yellow and white colleagues will be those of the boys who have been brought up in all white schools and who live in all white neighbourhoods. She argues that claims of ‘colour-blindness’ in such workplaces are based upon the ‘whitewashing’ out of racial politics of inequality leaving behind a shallow and exotic multiculturalism of food or music.

Ethnography’s tremendous potential for initiating contradictory dialogues that violate cross-class and interracial taboos in our home environments remains mostly untapped.

Academics of all ethnic background usually remain trapped in white public space; they flee the personal vulnerability and hideous, emotionally confusing brutality that engaging addicts, dealers, and petty criminals on their own turf requires.

In this attempt to convey through my conversations with drug dealers the cacophony of victims who victimize on the street, I worry about the inherent pornography of violence that automatically engulfs any presentation of the details of extreme social suffering in the United States.

Someone like Caesar does not need to be apologized for; he does not represent the Puerto Rican or Nuyorican communities; and his existence does not cast aspersions upon the “worthiness” of the poor in the inner city more broadly.

Caesar does, however, embody the social injustice of a nation that systemically chews up its most vulnerable citizens and spots them out onto inner-city streets where their desperate celebration of suffering terrorizes themselves, their neighbors, and their love ones. Worse yet, the agency of their internalized self-destructive rage convinces society to blame individual victims for social problems.

Understanding and representing these problems offers more than an intellectual exercise for ethnography: It is an urgent political challenge.