INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — I am a black woman born and raised in the space between the coasts and above the Mason-Dixon line. I am a face of the heartland, but you might not know it if you’ve been following the Trump-era reporting and commentary about the lives and political choices of people in the Midwest.

After the 2016 election, it was common to hear musings about how Midwestern voters flocked to Donald Trump because he spoke to the America they wanted to make “great” — a descriptor that many argued was code for “white.” Richard C. Longworth said in a representative Guardian op-ed that Midwestern voters liked Mr. Trump because he articulated their resentment of elites, trade, immigrants and the Clintons.

That kind of thinking has persisted. “Democrats, nationally, have not had a message or policies that have really connected with Midwestern voters, and that’s why we have lost elections here in recent years,” Paul Davis, a candidate in the Democratic primary for the House of Representatives in Kansas’ Second District, told Reuters in April. The revived sitcom “Roseanne,” before ABC canceled it in response to a racist tirade by its star, was heralded for the way the white family at its center gave voice to the “authentic” Midwestern working-class experience.

These are all reminders that in the minds of many Americans, the region where I have lived all my life is synonymous with whiteness. Of course, that’s false. Approximately seven million people who identify as African-American live in the Midwest. That means there are more black people in the Midwest than in the Northeast or the West. Indiana alone was home to more than 60 black settlements before the Civil War. Most of us are products of the Great Migration, the exodus of some six million black Americans from the South from 1916 to 1970. We came here to work, drawn by the industry of the Midwestern Rust Belt. We came here for equal opportunity.