Sometimes, the tiniest newspaper story is a window on something vast. Like the chimney in Mary Poppins: if you creep into the little aperture, it leads to a huge secret world.

A story I read last week, headlined "Black women 'more confident in their bodies'", was just a few paragraphs long. I only noticed it because it was illustrated with a photo of Michelle Obama in a rather fabulous little pencil skirt and cardigan – just my cup of sartorial tea.

The brief attendant story reported that a survey (commissioned by the Washington Post) had found black women have more self-esteem than white women – "even", breathed the paper in amazement, "if they weigh more".

What? No! Even if they weigh more? There are women whose confidence isn't tied directly to other people's opinions of their arses? Can this be possible? Next week: Lord Lucan found on unicorn farm, surrounded by people who think the postal service has improved over the last decade.

In the survey, 67% of "overweight" black women said they had high self-esteem, compared with only 41% of "average-sized or thin" white women.

This raised an interesting and complex idea. People have long complained that women of colour are under-represented in the "beauty" industries. In TV advertising, on billboards, at fashion shows, in women's magazines, you just don't see them. They rarely play romantic leads in films, either; Octavia Spencer's best shot at glory was playing a maid. Hattie McDaniel must have been rolling her eyes in the grave.

I don't think it's possible for me to give less of a toss about fashion (as anyone who's seen my clothes will readily agree), but even I feel a bit sad, as I flick impatiently through 19 pages of advertising at the front of a glossy magazine in the hope of finding an actual article before the dentist tells me he's ready, that all the girls are white.

You see the odd black model and I use the term advisedly: there's an occasional fuss about some new Eritrean signing with a "bizarre and compelling look", but these fashion mags and catwalks otherwise offer an overwhelming array of towering white replicates, each sullen white glare indistinguishable from the next.

I think we've reached general agreement (and when I say "we", I don't include creepy fashion designers with their ponytails and spangly trousers) that this is weird and wrong, that black women should be more visible in all media and especially the women's market.

But now it turns out that, hidden from glossy scrutiny, black women have managed to not get screwed up. They like themselves! They don't feel fat! They're getting on with life and worrying about other things entirely! The bigotry in fashion, cosmetics, advertising, TV and Hollywood hasn't damaged black women, it's saved them! They'd be mad to keep campaigning for greater visibility in Vogue or light entertainment, now it's clear that absence has made a lovely free space for them to form their own healthy self-image.

Let's be honest: white women are kidding themselves if they think they're represented in these media either. I share about as much genetic material with Julia Roberts or Heidi Klum as I do with a tree frog. But somehow, white women have been tricked into thinking that's how they should look, if they weren't such miserable failures – while black women, by the simple mechanism of being a different colour, have spotted the obvious and stayed sane.

Crawling further up the chimney of what was basically an extended picture caption to a Michelle Obama photo, I googled the full original survey.

Of black women, 68% said it's "very important" to have a successful career, and 62% that it's "very important" to have free time to pursue other interests – compared with 45% and 55% respectively of white women. So the white women care less about working and about stretching their minds in other ways, presumably because they're so damn busy trying to stay thin.

Meanwhile, 52% of white women think it's "very important" to be in a romantic relationship, compared with only 44% of black women. Basically, black women seem to be about 300 miles further down the road of liberation than their paler sisters. This chimney was, like Bert the sweep's, truly "a doorway to a place of enchantment".

Despite being more laissez faire about the whole work thing, 51% of white women said they experience stress "frequently", compared with only 40% of black women. If you (black, white or any other racial mix) aren't starting to get the message about this magic world where work and hobbies matter more than dieting and dating, then splash yourself with cold water, close that matchmaking website and read the figures again.

It's not that the black women in the survey are ruthless individualists, pursuing professional glory and solo fun to the exclusion of all else; the other telling statistic is that 74% of them consider "living a religious life" to be important, compared with 57% of white respondents. Some might say that this figure alone explains their greater confidence, lower stress and different priorities.

But the happier body image, at least, must have a lot to do with being ignored by (and thus disconnected from) the media mainstream and its impossible beauty ideals. Discovering that these black women seem to hold all the secrets to a happy and ambitious life, one's first instinct is to be even more furious about their under-representation. Let's get these good examples out there for us all to see! But it's a Schrödinger's Cat problem: the figures suggest that, once everyone starts looking, the priorities change and the peace of mind is killed off entirely.

This survey says more about the dangers of the media than anything that's come out of the Leveson inquiry.

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