Since the early 1960s, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (DCC) have been one of the most iconic cheerleading teams in professional sports, known for beautiful, talented dancers who are almost always white.
South Carolina native Armani Latimer says she wanted to join the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders because it “gives women a platform and a microphone to advocate for personal issues.”
Now, in her fifth season, Latimer, one of less than 10 Black dancers on the current team, is bravely using her platform to bring attention to alopecia – sharing how it has impacted her life in hopes of inspiring other young women to feel their best.
In a December essay for Women’s Health, Latimer revealed she was diagnosed with alopecia areata at age 12, a condition that causes her immune system to attack her hair follicles, causing her hair to fall out and leaving her with bald patches when she’s stressed.
Although her mother was able to help her cover the patches with hair when she was younger, Latimer says it got harder as she got older. As a member of her college dance team, she writes, she used sew-ins to cover the patches on her scalp. But by the time she joined the DCC, the stress made her hair fall out faster, and she opted to wear wigs on the field. The whole thing impacted her ability to give her all in her performances.
“My alopecia was hard to navigate during my early cheering days,” she wrote. “It was such a tumultuous time that I was only able to give about 50 percent of my effort. Some people picked up on the fact that I was more withdrawn and not my bubbly self, and having teammates that I could sit and cry with about what I was going through was healing.”
But in September, Latimer shared a beautiful black and white photo of herself without a wig on her Instagram account in honor of Alopecia Awareness Month.
And last week, she took the field with the team without a wig. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders shared the beautiful moment on Instagram in a December 10 post tagged, “Confidence takes center stage for Alopecia Awareness. 💙” The post has received over 300,000 likes to date.
You can hear her teammates encouraging her in the background, an outpouring of support she says she is grateful to have.
“I don’t believe we’re supposed to do life alone, and without my people, I wouldn’t have been able to break boundaries and be the woman I am today,” Latimer wrote in her Women’s Health essay.
Now that she is sharing her condition publicly, Latimer wants the world to know that she doesn’t see herself as a victim.
“Now that I’m more vocal about my condition, I know that alopecia doesn’t define me—it just adds character to who I am,” she wrote. “We can be empowered by so many things, and you don’t need your hair to feel that.”