Also says Muslims are the new “Negroes,” whatever the hell that means.

(Chicago Tribune/Clarence Page)– CBS anchor Katie Couric startled some listeners when she suggested a Muslim “Cosby Show,” but the idea actually has merit. It’s hard to be afraid of the people we see on TV sitcoms every week.

Such are the recent news items that led Couric in a recent year-in-review discussion to suggest a sitcom response to the “seething hatred” against Muslims.

“Maybe we need a Muslim version of ‘The Cosby Show,'” she said. “I know that sounds crazy. But ‘The Cosby Show’ did so much to change attitudes about African-Americans in this country, and I think sometimes people are afraid of things they don’t understand.”

She’s right. A black TV family like Bill Cosby’s Huxtables — or a Hispanic-American family like, say, George Lopez’s show — might not seem like such a big deal anymore, now that a real-life black family occupies the White House. But back in the 1980s, “The Cosby Show” was the decade’s biggest TV hit and is even credited with changing the way a lot of us black Americans viewed ourselves and our perceptions of opportunity in America’s mainstream.

…Unfortunately, Couric’s comment expresses something my own cynical side has noticed ever since the terrorist attacks: Muslims have become the new “Negroes,” the new occupants of the bottom-rung scary-minority status long occupied by us African-Americans.

That’s what occurs to me when I hear geniuses like one conservative talk-show host who wanted to block a proposed “ground zero mosque,” which isn’t a mosque or located at ground zero. “To protect our religious freedoms,” he said, sadly tone-deaf to the contradiction in that double-think.