This paper discusses how ‘the luxury to idle around’ for young Kurds and ‘the obligation to work’ for displaced Arabs becomes the fault line of racialization of Kurdish-Arab relations in post-2003 Iraq. During this period, the Kurdistan Regional Government sought to create an entrepreneur subject with university degrees out of a structurally impoverished population. This materialist/economic re-structuring was complemented by the social imagination of a more fuller reconfiguration, where a naturalized order of racial and religious coexistence would be maintained under Kurdish patronage. In the gas-rich area of Chamchamal, young Kurdish men find themselves living under the burden of this unfulfilled promise. Following the Anfal Genocide, the Kurdistan Regional Government had sought to solve the problem of unemployed, landless peasants by employing them in the security sector, either as pêshmergas or private militias. This arrangement has not only closed off possibilities for social mobility except through strictly party-controlled networks, but also has created a culture of shame around certain kinds of menial and service work and entry-level jobs. Stuck between these unsatisfying alternatives, young Kurdish men prefer to idle around, complain about the inequities of a failed world, and adopt a ‘non-performative’ nihilism that allows them to waste away time, and themselves (Bataille, 1991) while withdrawing from the labour market. The gap created by young Kurdish men are instead filled by displaced Arab labourers. De-classed and dispossessed, displaced Arab labourers not only have to enter into individualized sponsorship arrangements [kafala] with their employers to work in Kurdistan, they also become an incipient subject of pleasure for Kurds, who make them do the unpleasant jobs they are not willing to do. These emergent racial categorizations of work are complemented with bodily stereotypes about Arabs being resilient [to war, to heat], strong, and more skillfull in manual labour. For displaced Arabs themselves, this is a highly limited life, defined by the ‘obligation to work’. This paper argues that this emergent fault-line of racialization can be understood in a post-Ba’ath moment where the absence of a singular sovereign authority has left mutual codes of respect and dignified work open to question. The individualized idioms of work exercised by Kurds and Arabs project intimate labour arrangements made through personalized sponsorships to be a protective membrane of sociality, assumed to eschew the impersonal and exploitative qualities of the labour market. However, it also becomes the space to exercise unequal relationships under provisionally drawn authorities.