We take it for granted that there were “white” and “black” eunuchs at the Ottoman palace with each group having a different set of tasks and career paths, as well as their own chief eunuch as in the Chief “Black” Eunuch and the Chief “White” Eunuch. This paper aims to unpack how this color-coded division of labor was developed through the racialization of African as well as European eunuchs. Eunuchs had been employed at royal and imperial courts for centuries before the Ottomans. Among Muslim dynasties, one comes across to thousands of eunuchs who were employed at the Abbasid caliphal courts, for instance. As far as the available evidence go, many an African eunuch held governmental positions during the Abbasid era, as well as other Muslim dynastic polities, both in the Middle East and in South Asia. The Ottoman royal family had eunuchs from very early on as attested by some early fourteenth century documents. Unfortunately, the ethnic identity of early Ottoman eunuchs is difficult to ascertain. When we get to the late-sixteenth century, however, the above-mentioned color-coded division of labor seems to have been stabilized. While eunuchs of European origin were employed in the part of the palace where the future Ottoman administrators, generals, and elite soldiers were educated, African eunuchs were exclusively employed in the residential part of the palace where the emperor’s concubines lived and his children were raised. Moreover, while some eunuchs of European origin could receive appointments to posts outside the palace and become, for instance, governors of Egypt, we do not know any African eunuch who was appointed to a governmental position outside the court. This paper argues that the color-coded division of labor at the Ottoman court was not a simple continuation of pre-Ottoman practices of Muslim dynastic courts. To the contrary, it seems to have been developed as a conscious choice to keep African eunuchs’ career prospects limited to the confines of the Ottoman palace. The Ottoman administrators who built this system contributed to the racialization of Africans in the Ottoman Empire as “Black” and qualitatively different from and inferior to “Whites,” which might well have had an impact on their relative undesirability in slave markets.