Take a walk around downtown Tuscaloosa, and you’ll see it: $80 houndstooth sweatshirts, boutique “Southern belle” dresses and Dixieland Delight-emblazoned mugs line the shelves of souvenir stores, being sold to out-of-state students and their families who may never actually set foot outside of the Tuscaloosa city limits. Meanwhile — just a few miles north — families with deep Appalachian roots are actively being dismissed.
What students may not realize is that Tuscaloosa County is a part of the Appalachian region. Yes — the same region many reduce to coal country stereotypes stretches across approximately 55% of Alabama’s counties, including right here. Yet on campus, Appalachian identity is rarely acknowledged, except as something to be marketed. Appalachian students often engage in what scholars call “rhetorical (in)visibility” — concealing their identity to avoid being stereotyped as poor, ignorant or uncultured.
Restaurants and bars theme themselves around old Southern nostalgia; boutiques price our culture as luxury. But this kind of branding strips away the context of who actually created and sustained those traditions. What was once the lived reality of working-class families, is now nothing more than a curated brand.
At the same time, these cultural markers — an accent, living outside city limits, and often first-generation status — become grounds for mockery. Students from rural Alabama are often written off as less intelligent, less worldly or “redneck.” The irony is stark: Our culture is only valuable when it’s a profitable aesthetic, and laughable when it’s a lived experience.
Appalachian communities have long been underserved by the very systems that profit off of them. Federal and state grants to Appalachian Alabama betray this gap. Although millions are being invested in broadband or wastewater infrastructure, many communities still travel dozens of miles for health care, lack reliable internet and face conflicts in finding employment. Food deserts, a term coined for towns without access to grocery stores or fresh produce, are common across Alabama’s rural counties. As of 2023, 16.7% of Tuscaloosa County residents lived below the poverty line, 5.6% higher than the national rate of the same year.
As a native northern Alabamian, I see these inequalities every single day. I grew up unashamed of my accent, but as I began preparing for my professional career, I felt it — the weight of being seen as inherently uneducated, no matter my achievements. That feeling of invisibility lingers, even at a college in my own home state.
Due to strong university marketing, the student population is mostly out-of-state residents, with only around 42.3% of students hailing from Alabama. For many non-Alabamian students, Tuscaloosa is the only part of the state that they’ll likely ever see. They buy into a Southern aesthetic, without ever recognizing that just beyond the stadium are communities struggling against generational poverty, opioid addiction and underfunded school systems. These students are happy to consume “southernness,” but not to reckon with its complexities or support the people actively living it.
This gentrification of our culture is more than ironic — it’s harmful. When we erase Appalachia’s cultural presence in Alabama, we deny our own neighbors their visibility and their dignity. When we flatten their lives into marketable symbols, we are participating in the very same stereotyping that has long marginalized them. Appalachia is not just a brand. It is a living, breathing community, in Tuscaloosa County and beyond — one that deserves recognition beyond just boutiques and gameday memorabilia.
If The University of Alabama wants to celebrate “Southern culture,” we should start by respecting and supporting the Appalachian students, families and communities who are too often invisible in their own home.
