ABSTRACT
Since the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling against segregated schools in 1954, most black Americans have participated in a political, social, and economic revolution. The cultural explanation is largely dismissed in A Common Destiny, consistent with the taboo, common in political and academic circles, against anything that sounds like “blaming the victim,” a taboo that surfaced violently in the response to Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 study of the breakdown of the black family. The free blacks were increasingly acculturated to the white cultural mainstream. The experience of the West Indian immigrants refutes any argument that lighter skin color and consequent reduced discrimination are at the root of the success of the descendants of freedmen. Further evidence of the significance of culture in black achievement is furnished by West Indian immigrants in America. The debate about the condition and future of blacks in the United States is often overgeneralized.
