At the time of 9/11, I was a harried, stay-at-home mom whose hands were completely full with a husband and two boys, 4 and 7. I had no time for anything like watching television.

So it wasn’t until sometime later that I finally had a chance to sit down and watch “24” and the other programs of the day. But when I did, I got one clear and consistent message, ringing like a bell through everything I saw: “Fear! Fear the Muslim terrorists!”

Now that problem has abated to the point that President Biden is ready to put the Afghan war officially behind us. Which is just as well. Because it is becoming clearer with every passing day that we have an even bigger problem to deal with. There is a giant gaping wound across our nation’s soul and its name is “racism.”

President Biden has pledged to “eradicate the scourge of systemic racism” from our country. A noble goal surely — but how?

Some have said they want to get rid of racism, “root and branch.”

Of course, I agree with the goal. I, too, yearn for a non-racist America. But I fear that statements like these make racism sound like just a troublesome bit of poison ivy.

Others have called racism “a cancer upon this country.” That’s worse than poison ivy, but still — if racism is a “cancer,” well, what do we do with cancers? We cut them out if they’re tumors or we kill them with toxic chemotherapy and radiation.

We can’t do that with racism.

Racism isn’t the kind of thing that you can remove from a person. When people say “we must eradicate it, root and branch,” I get a weird image of someone pulling a squid-like alien out of my body.

That does not sound very safe. In fact, it might even backfire, making me cling all the more tightly to whatever you were hoping to “root out.”

The thing is I don’t think there is a single person in America who can say they are free from any hint of racism. No one–of any color. Not even the purists who criticize everybody else on Twitter; they just haven’t lived long enough to make any mistakes of their own yet.

All we have really are just varying degrees of bias, which we fight with varying degrees of success.

I’m certainly no angel. I am one of those white people who crossed the street if I saw a black man heading towards me and then chastised myself for doing it. I try to be the soft-hearted liberal my parents raised me to be, but even so I check the locks on my car doors before driving through what I consider to be a “bad” neighborhood, which always means poor and usually means “of color.” Back when I went places in the city, I was definitely one of those women who held my purse a little more tightly when someone black or brown got on the elevator. Well, if they were men anyway.

I bring up TV shows because they taught me what every red-blooded American TV watcher knows: When problems arise, you shoot them. Whether it’s “NCIS” or one of its spinoffs, or “FBI” or “S.W.A.T.” or “Chicago PD” — there is almost always the climactic scene where bad guys are popping up from behind cars or around building corners or from warehouse stacks — and the good guys shoot and kill them. And all of that is OK, because the bad guys were terrorists or Russian mafia or cartel hitmen or, more and more these days, sex traffickers — in any case, something irredeemably bad and therefore OK to kill.

But racism isn’t like that. No one is all good or all bad. Racism cannot be obliterated like a terrorist or a tumor. It lives in the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans, and it is not OK to kill them. It lives in the hearts and minds of our own selves and what are we to do about that?

Somehow we must find a way to open our hearts to people we fear. It won’t be quick or easy, and there are precious few role models or road maps for how to proceed.

But still we have to try if we want to save this nation.