I don't know the race of any software engineers I haven't met. Which is almost all of them. How could govt and the public know either? It seems strange to imagine it could matter.
Well, there are the famous ones. I'd bet facebook would have been treated differently if Mark Zuckerberg were black. You also probably automatically make guesses about people's race online. Race is a bit trickier, but it's not too hard to guess gender online (usernames, and things like this thing I just found on google: http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze)