When is a hairstyle also a political statement?

After a Glamour associate editor’s implication that being black is a fashion don’t, the magazine has issued an apology and is hosting a panel today on “Women, Race & Beauty,” which “will explore the culture of beauty, with an emphasis on ethnic hairstyles in corporate America.” (via.) They’ve got some excellent panelists, including Farai Chideya from NPR’s News and Notes and Daisy Hernandez of ColorLines. (If someone finds a link to a transcript or video, please post it in comments!)
The Newsday article about the panel also features a slideshow of several professional women talking about their hair, and how they’ve chosen to wear it. I think this comment, from Keisha Walker, is especially telling:

“It’s obvious that corporate America doesn’t care for natural hairstyles on Black women because you rarely see them wearing them there. People think that when Black women wear natural hair that they are making a political statement. And I find that strange, because I don’t know of any ethnic group where if the women wear their hair naturally, it is associated with politics.”

And Ifeanyi Chijindu echoes that:

“Hair is a big issue with black women. We are judged by it all the time When I wore my Angela Davis afro at school, all of a sudden people parted the way. They were treating me like a Black Panther. I could feel this huge sense of fear.”

That sounds, interestingly enough, like the Glamour editor’s critique:

‘No offense,’ she sniffed, but those ‘political’ hairstyles really have to go.

Maybe that’s a large part of why corporate America treats Afros, braids, and other natural styles as “inappropriate” for the workplace: Because they associate these hairstyles with black empowerment, and with women of color standing up for themselves and for their rights. It goes beyond the superficial racism of “this is a messy fashion don’t.” It’s also about the old boys’ (and girls’) club feeling threatened by an empowered woman of color.