Much of the sharpest examination comes, as it always has, from people of color, who have spent centuries acutely aware of how the force of whiteness operates. But these days, white people are also observing one another’s whiteness with unfamiliar intensity. When a white manager at a Philadelphia Starbucks called the police to report two black customers who didn’t order right away after one had asked to use the bathroom, a white customer, Melissa DePino, tweeted video of the ensuing arrests, adding: “All the other white ppl are wondering why it’s never happened to us when we do the same thing.” A few weeks later, a white woman named Michelle Snider confronted and filmed another white woman who called the police on a couple of black men for using a charcoal grill at an Oakland park. The caller’s image became a meme, #BBQBecky, showing up on “Saturday Night Live” and being dropped into stills from “Black Panther,” Barack Obama’s inauguration and a black Last Supper.

In each of these cases, as well as a string of others, white people didn’t get the usual benefit of assumed normalcy. They were portrayed, instead, as a distinct subculture with bizarre and threatening habits. “White people” were suddenly identified as the subgroup of Americans most likely to call the police on black people over a barbecue or to complain about whether every single football player stands for the anthem — stereotypes that rang true even to other white people.

For a long time, many white people assumed it was our due, as the majority, to encounter various racial others and marvel at the exotic things they ate, built or wore. Now we can go online and find people of color doing the gawking, offering jokes and anthropological scrutiny about white people’s underseasoning food, mistreating potato salad or eschewing washcloths.

Chief among our remarked-upon habits is our often-claimed colorblindness and affinity for individuality, a supposed indifference to race that often reads more like ignorance of it. A “Becky,” as in #BBQBecky, Damon Young explained in a piece on The Root, is a type of white woman who “exists in a state of racial obliviousness that shifts from intentionally clueless to intentionally condescending.” (Like the original ur-Becky in the intro to Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”) White people are referred to in proliferating slang: “wypipo,” “whytppl,” “WhitePeople™.” The spaces we unthinkingly dominate are “white spaces.” The indignant defensiveness we may display when confronted by racial conflict is “white fragility.” White people are losing the luxury of non-self-awareness, an emotionally complicated shift that we are not always taking well. “Twenty-five years ago black people were the lost population,” and “black intellectuals were on the defensive,” Darryl Pinckney observed this month in The New York Review of Books. “Now white people are the ones who seem lost.”