- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum," a special episode where we dive into the stories that defined the year.

From heated political debates to natural disasters and local shifts, we're breaking down the headlines that shaped our nation and impacted our North Carolina communities.

It's the ultimate recap you don't wanna miss.

Coming up next, stay with us.

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[bright music] - Welcome to "Black Issues Forum."

I'm Kenia Thompson.

Well, we're at the end of the year, and 2024 has brought us breaking news, heated debates, and moments that will certainly go down in history.

From political power plays to community triumphs, this year was like no other.

And today, we're gonna unpack the year's biggest moments and what they could mean for our future.

So I wanna bring on our guests so we can get right to the conversation.

With us, we have "Roll Call" columnist and host of "Equal Time" podcast and award-winning journalist, Mary C. Curtis.

And joining her is the former vice chair of Durham County Commission, Nimasheena Burns.

Welcome to the show.

- Glad to be here.

- Yes, of course.

So a lot, [guests laughing] and let's just go ahead and preface that we can't cover everything in 30 minutes that's happened throughout the year.

So I thought we'd do some highlights.

- Okay.

- Okay?

- And lowlights.

[people laughing] - And lowlights.

- And lowlights, that's right.

So, top of 2024, we came into the year a lot of Israel-Hamas conversation, right?

The conflict has intensified over the year.

Give us an update, Mary, I'll start with you, where are we today and what's kind of expected to go into 2025 under a Trump administration?

- Well, it's really interesting to realize that it was October 7th of 2023 that it was the initial Hamas attack on Israel.

1200 people killed, many taken hostages.

Although now it's the families of the people who are still hostages that are trying to keep their plight front and center.

But then we saw retaliation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, his right-wing government.

Many felt that Gaza actually was punished, civilians as well as folks who they claim were terrorists.

And we saw the demonstrations and protests in the colleges, and it really had implications here.

And now, of course, we see it did affect US politics.

Netanyahu is very much an ally of Trump.

He's very happy that Donald Trump won the election.

- Yeah.

- And he's looking at some of the folks that Trump is going to name to his cabinet and staff, like Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state, who is very much an Israel ally, and folks like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who basically says, you know, Gaza really doesn't exist, and there's a lot of concern on that end there.

And we see that even the International Criminal Court has taken Netanyahu to task.

So going into this, we can see that Netanyahu is really continuing this war, and there's been some incursions in the West Bank, and he's looking to see Trump as an ally, but you will still have people fighting what's going on.

And then we see recently what happened in Syria, the overthrow.

That region is volatile.

Going into the next year, it's hard to predict what's going to happen because it is a region of great volatility.

And you have the rest of the region, Iran and other countries, actually coming into play.

So, it'll be something that the foreign policy of the United States will have a lot to do with and we'll be seeing what's gonna happen next.

- Yeah.

Nimasheena, have you heard anything from Trump, what's planning to be done in 2025 as concerned?

- Well, I do wanna go back to something and really, I do wanna kinda center it around this next occupant of the White House and what he will do.

But I also wanna throw out there to folks, we have a death toll now of 1,700 Israelis.

We have 45,000 Palestinians, 17,000 of which we know are children.

And we don't know when that death toll is gonna go down.

We absolutely don't.

And that doesn't even count the 2.3 million people that are displaced.

It does not count for all the infrastructure that has to be rebuilt, how we be rebuilt, and what that will look like.

We can't even make assumptions about that.

I mean, we can't.

I know we're gonna talk about national disasters in our own right in a little bit here, but we don't even know what financially that looks like to help to rebuild.

And you have a person coming back into the White House, who has said very clearly when they asked him, "What is your foreign policy approach?"

He says, "America first."

Now let me make it very clear for all the viewers out there, I love America too.

If I didn't, I wouldn't have ran for office to make it better for the residents of Durham.

But what is potentially problematic, we have an individual who is going in there.

He's already shown you what he will do.

I like to think of things based off of precedence.

This is a man who the last time he occupied the White House, pulled out of his commitment on the Iran Nuclear Plan.

He reneged on his commitments to Paris Climate.

This is a person who's coming into office and is gonna treat it like his business.

This is transactional.

At best, this current administration's efforts at a ceasefire or peace have been fragile.

And now we wanna put somebody in there who is actually gonna say, "This has to be transactional."

I don't see that being in any way, being able to destabilize.

I think it destabilizes any peace talks, and I think if we really wanna talk about America first, and we really wanna talk about lives, we have to be very honest about this is an individual whose party, I'm not talking about anti-gun laws, I'm talking about sensible gun laws.

If I can't get him to care about Mother Emanuel, Abundant Life, the recent school shooting, I can't get him to care about Columbine, and I cannot get him to care about Sandy Hook, how in the world am I gonna get him to care about the lives that are lost over here?

So if you wanna say that America first is your policy, let's see what you do for America first.

I haven't seen any examples of where you've put us first.

I've seen you put yourself and your family first, and we have not been, we've not been the beneficiaries of that.

And I don't think any other country will be at all.

Because again, he has not worked hard to make sure that any of his global partnerships have worked out.

- Yeah, and the thing of this is you say, you know when you talk about America first, it can't be America only, because all of these issues are interconnected.

We see climate is interconnected with immigration, because we'll have people in our own countries and throughout the world immigrating because of that.

Conflict, like the conflict in the Middle East will cause more displaced folks, as you said, and also more immigration.

And so all of these issues are interconnected.

We are global citizens, whether we like it or not.

- I know we have to pivot, move on, but to her point, as a commissioner in Durham, water is coming from lakes and rivers in adjacent counties.

I cannot sit here and say, "I can only focus on Durham."

I have to think about the crime that is adjacent to me, to think about the water quality, think about traffic patterns.

And when you don't think about those things and how they affect your citizenry, you have a problem, and this is gonna affect us.

- Well, I wanted to add a question.

- Sorry.

- No, you are absolutely fine.

Great commentary, fine.

But some people may say, "That doesn't impact me."

You know, how does it impact us?

How does it impact our pockets, our homes, our children, our lives?

Open to either one of you.

- I would go so far as to say, even if we couch that issue and we think about the broader global landscape, this is a man who did not even keep his promise about tariffs.

So we're about to see prices go up.

We're about to see, you saw in Philadelphia, right after the election, there was an email sent out to a number of manufacturing firms saying, "Hey, we're gonna go ahead and buy a lot of our materials early, so you all won't be getting a Christmas bonus because we're worried about tariffs."

And then you saw countless Americans saying, "Wait a minute, the tariffs are for us and not for other people?"

So you have somebody talking to folks about issues to a group of people and they don't even understand 'em a lot of times.

And we're already seeing effects.

People thought the effects were gonna be long term, two, three years down the road.

No, your Christmas bonus and this man is not even sworn in yet.

And I know that that seems very small, but that's an indicator of what we are going to see month after month after month when we are not pulling in goods and services, not sending out our goods and services from even North Carolina.

We send out a lot of peanuts, we send out a lot of pork.

What is it going to look like when countries are like, we can do this for ourselves and we don't need it.

- Also, we don't grow as Americans.

We don't grow all of our own food.

- We don't.

- We don't manufacture all of our own products.

Look at everything under the holiday.

All the presents, look where they are made.

Even things that we think are made here, parts come from every other part of the world.

So yes, we cannot be isolationist in this way.

It's impossible in the world we live in right now.

So you will see it as you said in the pocketbooks, but on your kitchen table, all of these things.

- Well, and many Americans have been looking for relief in many different ways.

One of the ways over the year has been in student loan debt relief, right?

So that was a big conversation.

- Yes.

- Many of us were looking for that, what was it, $7.7 billion that was proposed to cancel over 160,000 people's debt across the country.

And you know, I remember hearing some people waking up and their debts were gone and they're like, oh my God, this is amazing.

- Oh, yes, I know some.

- Some people are still waiting and it may never happen.

We've seen fluctuation in applications to institutions, four year institutions, and we're hearing conversations from people saying they may decide not to go to college.

- As a professor, I hear students saying, "I don't know if I can continue to do this for another three, four years."

So talk about the impact that the forgiveness has had and is there any potential that we will continue to see forgiveness happen in the new administration, Mary?

- Well, we've seen that, yes, it's been a great relief for many, many folks, but we've also seen a lot of the Biden administration programs be challenged in court and hit a lot of roadblocks.

With some success.

Even recently, they've reinstated a couple of programs that aren't quite as effective and didn't give quite the benefits of some of his new proposals, but at least it gives some benefit to them.

and we have seen, well, in North Carolina, it's interesting because they've invested a lot in their community colleges, which is a way to get started for some students before they even transfer to a four year institution.

And then we've seen an enormous impact on HBCUs because it's historically they have been less the beneficiary of both federal and state funding.

They have lower endowments, rising tuition needs, and they really don't wanna stress their students, many of whom are first generation college students.

Now, on the other hand, because of the pullback in some affirmative action and DEI programs, a lot of the HBOs, a lot of the HBCUs, sorry about that.

- No, it's fine.

- Have seen their enrollment surging.

So this is something.

But then others have had to take on large loans and large debt, which is going to be a problem.

So I cannot see talking about the new administration coming in, that they are not gonna be extending some of these student loan programs.

So we might see some pushback from young people maybe to get more politically motivated.

- Yeah.

I mean, I hope so.

I mean, we need to hear their voices too.

And you mentioned HBCUs, so let's bring it local.

Another top news item was St. Augustine's.

University accreditation being lost, we've seen them gain that back.

However, part of that was getting loans that were a bit predatory.

And so when we look at the stability of that institution, what are the plans for 2025?

I hadn't really heard much.

And so didn't know if your ear was to the ground on that.

- There were two things that I want to answer that one and then go back to some of the talk about education, student loan debt.

I did know some folks who did wake up to those and they woke up and the next emotion was tears because I don't have to pay this money back.

I still encourage young people, we still do have public service forgiveness.

We still have income-based repayment.

So I'm always encouraging young people because parents are always going to have rising costs and debt anxiety.

So they're always going to have that.

They had it 50 years ago when they were sending kids to college.

So I don't think that that's gonna go away.

But telling young people to be creative and come into public service and see if they can do that tenure and see if they can pay it off.

But one of the things I will say about our HBCUs, especially here in North Carolina, we are home to the largest number of four year HBCUs.

So we have this really great ecosystem.

And one of the things I'm most proud of, what did, even with all this going on, what did Saint Augustine do just these past couple of weekends?

They held their first fall commencement.

They've never done that because they want their students, while they're under this temporary accreditation, as they go through the appeals process, they wanted their students to be able to graduate with dignity, with dignity and have their heads held high.

That same day, what did we see?

We see all the alumni walk up to that stage for those 30 graduates and offer $40,000 and say, "I wanna pay down some of this debt."

So I think that is what we have to hone in on.

Bennett College has had its troubles and look at where we are now.

They say we might go to a micro college.

Is that gonna work?

We don't know.

Look, right now at what we're seeing with Barbara Scotia, just two weeks ago, we saw President Chris Ray get $300,000 in debt from the Department of Commerce forgiven.

We see that he's negotiating forgiveness with the county commission there so that that debt can be forgiven.

We've seen that his debt, not his, but the university's debt with the federal government.

So if you can get leadership in there that is really strategic and taking the time.

He's only been there a year.

I use that as an example, but all of our institutions, both public and private, have had some roadblocks.

But what we've seen, we've seen them be resilient and come back.

So I would encourage anybody the same way that that alumni came back and said, "I want to give $40,000 to pay down somebody's debt," where are the families at?

I went to UNC Chapel Hill, I went to North Carolina Central University.

I think the best individuals who are poised to tell those stories are individuals that are actually beneficiaries of those educational institutes.

We saw last year, right, we saw last year saw individuals who were outside of St. Augustine say St. Aug and Shaw should merge.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

Let us kind of handle this issue.

And as far as the predatory lending goes, I think what really hurts me is that when we go into education, whether it's in the church, whether it's in business, we're very tight-lipped about our issues.

You know that old saying, what happens at home stays at home, that is not what we need to happen.

If you need help, we need to talk about needing help.

I think Mary brought it up very beautifully that we don't have the endowments that other institutions have.

So it's time for us to come home and take care of our own and let's see what that looks like.

And then I'll stop here because the students are not going anywhere.

We saw uptick in applications.

Now whether or not we can do acceptance rates because we have smaller dorm rooms, but you are seeing these children who are post George Floyd and these children who are post Covid and these children who quite frankly are post and now about to be back into Trump again, they're looking for an inclusive learning environment.

And they're gonna continue to choose HBCUs, so it's incumbent upon us as leaders to make sure that they're still around so these children have a good place to learn.

- Yeah, and you'll see outreach to alums and saying, y'know, "come on, you got your education here.

You're very successful now."

And I think you'll see an additional outreach to folks because, y'know, HBCUs still really graduate quite a few of our leaders.

- Indeed, yep.

All right, we're gonna keep on rolling on.

- Sorry.

- No, you are fine.

It's great.

Immigration up next, right?

It's hot and heavy.

It's a hot topic.

Most recently, I think we've heard more about the Haitians, had my counterparts on the couch, we talked about it, but a lot of people under the Biden administration, oh, goodness, the Temporary Protected Status program, right, TPS, over 300,000 Haitian immigrants are in that.

We've got a bunch of other immigrants who fall underneath that.

However, it was planned to extend until February 2026.

That too may change.

What are we looking at for immigrants going into 2025?

- Well, we saw that immigration was a huge issue in the election, and a lot of that is demonization, fear of the other.

And, of course, Haitians came under a great deal of that.

We saw all of the falsehoods about them eating cats and dogs and people's pets brought up by the president-elect, Donald Trump, and the vice president-elect, JD Vance.

And so they are rightly concerned.

I've seen that some are actually leaving Springfield and other places now, trying to go to places that are more friendly for immigrants.

And we saw many of the employers there were very happy to have them.

They really revitalized a lot of areas in that city.

They built lives, they brought their families there, and so this was big.

But we see that president-elect Trump has promised to keep his tough line on immigration and he's brought in some really staffers that have promised to be just as tough.

Tom Homan, his incoming border czar, has basically said he's gonna look at all of these Temporary Protected Status folks and say, "put the emphasis on temporary" and threaten to send them back.

And a lot of people are afraid because I've reported some of these Haitian folks have relatives still there, friends who are being killed, and they're saying, "what, are you going to send us back to a place of unrest and instability where we might be killed, when we've really started to build our lives?"

But he's promised on day one, president-elect Trump, that he's gonna be tough on this.

So we've seen the demonization and we'll see what happens, but they're pretty serious about this.

- Yeah, before you chime in, I want to pull in Project 2025 so that we can, 'cause we still got a few more topics to pull in here.

We've got gun control, abortion, education, there's a lot.

But in addition to immigration, because I'm lumping that into Project 2025 as well, we're seeing a lot of shifts that are happening and many of this was outlined in Project 2025, right?

And so we were kind of hopeful that had Vice President Kamala Harris gotten into office that perhaps that would've kind of not have been as prevalent.

But now with a Republican administration and knowing that, well, I won't make any assumptions there or any accusations, but it may become a real thing that we have to confront some of these issues.

- And it's not just the accusations.

During the campaign, president-elect Trump said, "I've never seen it.

I've never heard about it.

I don't know anything about Project 2025".

- That's where I was going.

- But his Agenda 47, if folks looked at it, had a lot of the same issues about it.

- And the chief architect worked for him.

- Oh, yes.

- There was that too.

- Definitely, and when it comes to education, this affects a lot of us, folks in public schools, we've seen here in North Carolina, the push behind putting taxpayer money to pay for private schools.

And that is something that is very big in Project 2025 and the incoming Trump administration, the shifting resources from the public schools, who have to take folks who are disabled, who have to make accommodations.

Private schools don't have to do this.

And in Project 2025, they talk about taking away the funds, the Title I funds that help kids in low income schools or low income kids in schools.

Doing away with the Department of Education.

And can they do this on day one?

Maybe not, but what they can do is pull away from protections for LGBTQ students, enforcement of civil rights laws, these kinds of things.

[indistinct] - Well, here's what I would say.

We talk about him doing this on day one.

Day one was last year.

We have got to be very honest about that.

- [Speaker] Yeah.

- Now, the same way a governor and a president, they are not kings.

They do not have complete authority.

There's a reason why North Carolina, much like this country, has three chambers of government.

You have your legislative, your judicial, and you have your executive.

And what we have seen both here in North Carolina, except our governor, our incoming governor and outgoing governor, both Democrats.

But we see right now that the House, the Senate, as well as the courts, are all under Republican control, much like what we see here in the country.

So when we talk about Project 2025 and we talk about TSP, go back to when Trump was in his previous, previously, he tried to do it away with TSP.

And when he was unable to do it, well, he said, well, okay, I can't do this, but there's a caveat in there here we can start to send individuals back, especially if the unrest in their country has died down.

Haiti was actually one of those countries.

So even if they're not able to walk it back, they're gonna try to find loopholes where we're saying we can't take anybody else.

- Yeah.

- And if we wanna talk about Project 2025, I think we have to look at the fact that we have governors who are writing executive orders who are walking back DEI, that is straight outta the project 2025 playbook.

We wanna talk about some of the abortion laws that we've seen walked back.

And it's somewhat hypocritical, because you're not seeing complete abortion bans in some of these states.

They're going from 20 to 12 weeks.

So it's really not that you have an issue with abortion.

This is really an attack on the poor, because who is in a position to actually get better access to care at 12 weeks?

Somebody who has insurance, somebody who has access to an ultrasound, somebody who has access to medical care.

And so those are some of the things when people sit back and talk about it, not just the DEI work, not just some of the voting restrictions.

We are going to see these things come back.

Their vote, just because we haven't seen it in the news doesn't mean that it's not in committee.

And I think the most critical one has been educational censorship.

You are seeing states across the country burn books.

Books, children's books that don't have anything in them.

Books that we read.

Maya Angelou's "Why the Caged Bird Sings".

They're burning these books.

Lupita Nyong's "Sulwe".

There are books that don't have anything in them that we read as children.

There are racial slurs in Tom and "Huck Finn", and we are not seeing these books burned.

And so that's where we are.

- Yeah.

I wanna pause there, because we still have one more topic to cover.

We got three minutes left.

I know, I told you it was gonna go by fast.

Hurricane Helene.

Not only devastated western North Carolina, but also many other areas.

But we did the special in western Carolina, we saw the devastation on minority communities.

I was told by some that they weren't gonna get power or water till spring of next year.

And I think like a lot of things, they're hyped up in the news.

We hear, we talk about it for a while and then we forget about it.

But what the deeper implications are gonna be is economical justice, and that safety.

And across North Carolina, that's become a big topic.

Just thoughts of what can be done to ensure that the western North Carolinians have what they need or the minority communities can access equitable.

- [Kenia] Housing and conditions, I wanna go to Mary.

- Okay, okay.

- Yeah well, traditionally, we've seen sort of a lag in help for folks who are low income, the disabled, the poor, and in your reporting, which was terrific, we saw that a lot of community folks are helping, sort of, let's help ourselves.

But actually there are many laws, and in the housing laws for the Department of Justice and HUD and FEMA, that they are tasked to make sure that it's equitable, what happens is equitable, and they do get what they need.

So we need to hold them to task.

And I'd like to also bring in the fact that weather disasters and responding to them didn't used to be very politicized, but they are now.

We see that in all the bills that are coming up, the bill in North Carolina that had aid tucked into a bill to take power from the incoming democratic candidates.

And one of the thing, you know, there's a myth that minorities are not interested, black folks aren't interested in climate change.

- [Interviewer] Very interesting.

- Well, they are, because it affects them the most.

- Yes, 30 seconds.

- I would just say, I think whatever we're gonna do in West North Carolina has to be very niche.

I'm from Eastern North Carolina.

I've been through a lot of hurricanes.

I think it's almost like muscle memory.

When a hurricane happens there, we know exactly what we have to do.

What we saw here was saturated ground, and we saw mudslides, and we saw days of devastation post-hurricane.

So their ecosystem is mainly uplifted by small business.

So how do we go in and support small businesses?

That's gonna be the first thing.

The second thing, really having a really hard conversation with folks about their planet.

A lot of the counties in Western North Carolina, unlike the privilege that we have here, don't even have a lot of planning and zoning laws.

So even if we wanna come back and say this is how we wanna rebuild, they did not build that way previously.

And who is going to go in with the soft touch and say, "This is what we need to do."

And I think we need to hire people from that region.

We don't need to pull in people from Raleigh and from DC to say, "This is how you build back."

I think those offices have to be manned by individuals there who know people best, and I think we will see it come back to this brilliance.

- Nimasheena Burns.

- I'm sorry.

- Mary C. Curtis, thank you so much.

I appreciate your commentary and your thoughts.

- Well, thank you.

We got a little bit.

- Little bit.

- Little bit.

- Well, we thank you as well for watching.

We wish you a wonderful end of 2024.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag Black Issues Forum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson.

I'll see you next year.

[upbeat music] ♪ - [Narrator] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.