On the early 1990s show, “In Living Color,” comedian Damon Wayans used to headline a skit that poked fun at the industriousness of Jamaicans and their disdain for anyone working less than ten jobs.

These days, West Indian blacks like David Veron are laughing too. All the way to the bank. And into the census records.

Around the time that Wayans was mining comedy material from the lives of people like Veron, in the New York City borough of Queens, they were spinning their hard work and their dreams into gold. Now, according to The New York Times, the median yearly income of black households in Queens, at nearly $52,000, surpasses that of whites. When it comes to counties with more than 65,000 people, that claim puts it in a class by itself.

Apparently, this accomplishment was driven not only by the growth of two-parent black families, but by black folks who aren’t from around there.

Veron, a 45-year-old lawyer who was born in Jamaica, told the Times that Queens had a heavy influx of West Indians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and that they came to the United States to pursue opportunity and an education. Now, he said, many of them are college graduates and coming into their own.

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I’m glad to see that some black people are flipping the script on the pages of pathology that seem to dominate our lives each day. Yet while it’s tempting to say that many immigrant-born black people are successful because they work harder than American blacks, to me, they’re successful because of the cultural values that guide them.

Values that we sorely need to reinstate in all of our communities.

For the most part, black people who come from struggling Caribbean countries -- and I know a whole lot of them -- place a huge value on education. That’s because in their countries, education tends to be unaffordable for many of them. Many also come from places where corruption has obliterated the middle class; where they lack even the remotest tools for lifting themselves out of poverty.

So when they get to the United States, they don’t see the schools as places to hang out during the day. Nor do they shrug off education as something that only white people do. They see it as a means of getting ahead in an economy that has more to offer than tour guide jobs.

And they work it.

On top of that, their willingness to work multiple jobs comes from having lived in countries in which there are few, if any, social services. So they don’t look to game the social service system as much as they look for chances to make their way in the economic system. And what they aim for as a means to survive is far broader than what many other black people in poor communities are conditioned to aim for -- to get enough money to get access to a better opportunity, not the chance to get free services forever.

Now, does this mean that American-born black people are worthless, and all immigrant-born blacks are hard-working? Of course not. There are a lot of immigrant-born blacks who wind up in our criminal justice and welfare systems as well. But what the success of West Indies-born black people in Queens shows is that, unlike many black people who live in impoverished neighborhoods, they haven’t been corrupted by a culture that makes patience a vice and vision a joke. Nor have their lives been as heavily influenced by legal discrimination and the social and economic isolation that has sapped many American black people of their optimism.

In other words, they come to the United States believing that they can succeed, and we’ve lived through circumstances that have made many of us believe that we cannot. They’re more driven by the dream, while more of us are wary of -- and paralyzed by -- the hypocrisy.

Yet and still, I’m proud of the immigrant-born black people like Veron and others who are busy busting notions regarding the limits of black success; black people who are creating middle-class communities that counteract the idea that every place we inhabit is doomed to poverty and misery.

And the most poignant lesson that they illustrate is this: Sometimes, the best way to work the system is by mastering the tools that are within it -- tools like education. Not by leaning on the crutches.

Or worse, succumbing to the pathology.