ABSTRACT
Some rime ago Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire when he was filming a relevision commercial. Perhaps the incident became newsworthy because it brought together two seemingly opposed news values: fame and misfortune. But judging by the way it was reported in one black community newspaper, The Black Voice, Michael’s unhappy accident took on a deeper significance for a cultural politics of beauty, style and fashion. In its feature article, ‘Are We Proud to be Black?’, beauty pageants, skin-bleaching cosmetics and the curly-perm hairstyle epitomized by Jackson’s image were interpreted as equivalent signs of a negative black aesthetic. All three were roundly condemned for negating the natural beauty of blackness, and were seen as identical expressions of subjective enslavement to Eurocentric definitions of beauty, thus indicative of an ‘inferiority complex’.1
