this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
87 points (96.8% liked)
Map Enthusiasts
4961 readers
198 users here now
For the map enthused!
Rules:
-
post relevant content: interesting, informative, and/or pretty maps
-
be nice
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Growing up, my father was in the military, so we moved every 3 years. One of our locations was northern Alabama, and I remember crying about it at the time because I really didn't want to live there and had always heard bad things about it.
Actually living there, it's fine. The Huntsville area has NASA and a lot of aerospace jobs, and is generally a nice and pleasant place to live. You can buy houses within a 30-45 min commute of pretty good jobs for surprisingly cheap (was just looking at a 3000+ sq ft brick house with a couple acres for $120k, needed a new AC unit and some work, but nice enough to live in while you fix it up). The people are really friendly compared to most other states I lived in, and the countryside is pretty beautiful.
I can't speak for most of the rest of the state, but in general I think Alabama gets a worse reputation than it deserves. Biggest issues with it are the tornados and humidity.
Alabama is way nicer than it's given credit for. I drive most of the way through the backcountry highways and it's great. We stop at a great many small towns and they're surprisingly clean and charming.
I noticed a lot of public works improvements and activity. Turns out they finally put a tax on gasoline and put that into the new Rebuild Alabama Act. The results are most impressive.
Another neat thing, Alabama is the most heavily forested state in the union. Nice!
I guess Huntsville is a bit off the path, but there's a fuckoff big Confederate flag on the I-65 between Birmingham and Montgomery. Friendly is a matter of proximity and perception: you were either not close enough or too respectable to meet the sort that give Alabama its reputation.
Haven't seen that, sure it's still there? Haven't been that way in a year and I'm never driving through Birmingham again. I talk up Alabama a good bit around here, but Birmingham, 🤮
I've been to Huntsville before and was surprised at how charming it was. It felt like one of those idyllic suburbs from a movie.
Having Huntsville atop the rest of Alabama is kind of like having Canada atop the rest of America.
Also, the most common thing you'll hear anyone in Alabama say is "Thank God for Mississippi," because at least that way they still have someone to look down on.
Alabama has the nicest small towns I've ever driven through. I'm often commenting to my wife, wondering how the hell such a small town has enough industry and tax base to be so nice.
They really don't deserve the reputation. Arkansas and West Virginia and others are far, far worse off.
They're nice to drive through.
They're not nice to live in, especially...
Well, okay. I'm biased because I lived for well over a decade in Alabama, and I'm not white.
I'm Native American, and there's this weird thing that happens in Alabama when you're native.
One, people think that you are Mexican and so they will speak Spanish to you and ask you to translate things and wonder how much your gardening services cost. (and when I did that kind of work, my prices were very reasonable)
Two, once they learn that you're native because you happen to have, you know, three foot long hair and high cheek bones, they will assume that you have mystical powers and can talk to the wind and that animals will communicate to you with the secret magics.
So I got the downside of racism, where people hated me and people who liked me as a person would not date me because of the color of my skin, but I also got the upside of racism, where people thought that I was special and magical because of who my parents happened to be.
All of that aside, as I grew up, I thought I must be somebody special because every time I went to the store, people would follow me through the store and watch me closely, constantly sticking their head around corners as if getting a glimpse of me was one of the highlights of their time travel experience.
Turns out that they were just being racist and watching the little brown boy to make sure that he didn't steal something or cause some sort of kerfluffle that they could get involved in.
I said all of that to say Alabama is incredibly racist.
My lived experience is that of racism.
And nobody lynched me.
I was not beat up.
I was not horrifically abused.
But racism is still racism, and people held me back and thought less of me, thought differently of me, or refused to evaluate me on the same level that they would have evaluated me if I was white, because I was not white.
So sure, a lot of those small towns are, you know, quaint and pretty and the people will smile and wave hands at you and open the door for you and say cute little colloquialisms with southern twang voices.
But if you don't fit into their established social groups by benefit of the color of your skin or your financial position in the world, don't rely on that for anything other than a very thin veneer of how they justify to themselves how they weren't really racist because they didn't murder you, they just watched you like a hawk and made sure that you were kept on your tippy toes to make sure that you know you are being allowed to be where you are.
I’m sure it’s lovely apart from the killer tornadoes.
Alabama is nowhere near tornado alley. You're mixed up with some midwest state.
To be fair, a lot of places have some kind of natural disaster threat. Hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, floods, etc.
Don't forget local corruption