Why a Hairstyle Made Headlines

Aesthetically speaking, it was not one of McKinney's better moments. Her hair, which she had for years worn in thick braids, seemed to be in a limbo between a polished Afro and a head of funky twists. Had the humidity gotten to it?

In an investigation into her personal styling techniques, a call went out to her Washington office. McKinney started wearing her hair loose in January, according to spokesman Coz Carson. When asked whether the new style had been done by a professional or by the congresswoman herself, Carson shouted, "That's a woman's question!" Which is to say, he did not know the answer, nor did he respond to a subsequent e-mail assuring him that the question was asked in all seriousness.

Hairstylist Christine Kendrick, who does not work with McKinney, provided a few general insights. As far as she could tell, McKinney's new style is a "twist-out." "You can keep the look for about three days," says Kendrick, who owns Artistic Expressions Natural Hair Salon in Camp Springs.

"But if it gets wet, it's just all over. . . . And when it hits the elements, it dries out." At the news conference, it looked as though McKinney's twist-out had passed its expiration date.

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Instead, talk turned ugly on blogs about her news-conference hair. It became the impetus for all sorts of racially driven insults about her locks and their natural texture. A black woman's hair is an easy, timeworn source of racist mockery. It has become an exhausting cliche of self-loathing whether it is kinky, hot-combed, braided, locked or chemically relaxed. (Indeed, plenty of black folks see all kinds of dire race-traitor undertones in Condoleezza Rice's smooth, controlled cap of hair.) A black woman's hair is a bottomless source of inspiration for essays, books and documentaries.

But for McKinney, hair is part of her politics.

And dismissing queries about it seems a bit disingenuous, since so much of her public persona, from the moment she arrived in Congress in 1992, has been based on her hair. Up until this year, she wore it in two thick braids wrapped around her head -- often held together by a large bow -- despite suggestions from her own advisers to change it. It was a hairstyle sometimes seen on elementary school girls, but rarely on professional women. The braids made her look as though she should be hiking up the Alps wearing a gingham dress and carrying two milk pails.