Caucasians

Last weekend, Cindy Wilkerson, a 44-year-old former social worker, helped organize three busloads of protesters who rode from Mississippi to Washington for the big protest targeting President Obama and his policies. The passengers, all white, wore T-shirts identifying themselves without irony as "Freedom Riders." Decades ago, that phrase evoked something quite different. It was bestowed on the predominantly black and white activists who traveled to the Deep South to challenge segregation -- and were sometimes met with hostility and violence.

After a summer of healthcare battles and sliding approval ratings for President Obama, the White House is facing a troubling new trend: The voters losing faith in the president are the ones he had worked hardest to attract. New surveys show steep declines in Obama's approval ratings among whites -- including Democrats and independents -- who were crucial elements of the diverse coalition that helped elect the country's first black president. Among white Democrats, Obama's job approval rating has dropped 11 points since his 100-days mark in April, according to surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Shelby King is a fan of Barack Obama. She admires his charisma and passion and believes he could unite the country as president. On Saturday, however, King plans to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton in South Carolina's Democratic primary. "She's got the experience," said King, 61, a real estate agent in Columbia, the state capital. "She's tough. She's bright. I'm a female of her era, and I know how hard it's been to get to where she's gotten." Edward Pair also likes Obama.

With the Democratic presidential race about to enter another crucial phase of voting, Barack Obama has launched a newly aggressive strategy to undermine two pillars of support for rival Hillary Rodham Clinton: Latinos and working-class white voters. Each is an important constituency in major March 4 primaries -- Latinos in Texas and blue-collar workers in Ohio -- which many believe Clinton must win to keep her White House hopes alive.

Every freshman who enrolls at Albany State University knows the saga of this small, proud school. In a mandatory class, they learn how Joseph Winthrop Holley, a son of slaves, built the campus in 1903 to educate his fellow African Americans here along the banks of the Flint River.

When George Cole moved to southeast Los Angeles County looking for factory work in the early 1970s, the mostly white and working-class area was being transformed by waves of Latino immigration. Cole applied for an apartment and the landlady bestowed her approval. "It will be nice to rent to a good white boy," he recalled her saying. "We've been doing a good job of keeping the blacks out, but the Mexicans are like cockroaches. They're hard to keep out."

White teenagers who are the most avid watchers of R-rated movies or who have television sets in their bedrooms are more than twice as likely to take up smoking compared with white teens who don't, according to a report published today. Experts said the study confirmed Hollywood's pervasive influence by showing that even when other risk factors -- such as peer smoking -- were taken into account, media exposure remained a powerful force on white children.

FOR as long as anyone has kept statistics, and with a range of speculative explanations, what has always been irrefutable is that white people in America live longer than black people. Called the black-white life expectancy gap, it has widened, narrowed and widened again during the last 100 years. Now that gap has narrowed to a historically low level, from a 7.1-year gap in 1993 to a 5.3-year gap in 2003, the latest year for which national statistics are available.

White men in California can expect to live an average of seven more years than black men, according to a new study that echoes national surveys of the long-documented black-white gap. Heart disease and homicides account for much of the difference in life expectancies. White women in California live on average about five years longer than African American women, in large part because of higher rates of diabetes and stroke in the latter group.

We've got big plans for retirement. We'll buy a boat and finally get that beachfront home -- in Costa Rica, if not Malibu. We'll dust off our passports and travel the world. We'll enjoy days chasing the grandkids around and spend romantic nights at home -- alone. But now I find that the man I plan to spend my twilight years with has only about four years of post-retirement leisure time coming. Then he'll croak.