“You’re a great example of why we need to end Affirmative Action,” someone named Jim B. wrote me in an email this weekend. “Get a job scrubbing floors. It’s the only thing you’re good for.”

On Twitter, it was about the same. “Keep thinking that your important. Lol … your a nobody … you fill a seat … only because your Black. that’s the only reason. cause if was based on education or merit, you would be working at Walmart … sometimes the truth hurts … your a lowlife.”

“Is that you using that black girl magic I heard about. You so silly, can’t believe you have a job there. LOL”

One email read simply, “have a banana.”

These are just a few examples of many.

I am a black woman who writes for The New York Times and appears on national TV. And if you’re black in America, no matter who you are, what you accomplish or how hard you work, there will always be people to remind you that you are black, that you are “just a nigger.”

A colleague at The Times, an African-American woman, wrote to me on Friday afternoon, “They resent that you exist.”

It didn’t help that I write for a newspaper where my colleagues are assiduously working to hold a rogue president accountable every day. We are living in a world where there is no grace for the smallest, most inconsequential mistake. In an instant, I became a target of those who are furious with the media for being too liberal, or not liberal enough, a totem for the grievances of millions of people who seem to be hurting. No doubt, some people piled on because they just wanted the “likes” and brushed aside the inconvenient fact that I was a human being.

Several days into the experience, which is hell, I ran into an acquaintance on the street who informed me that the video clip had been shared on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.” I began to wonder how others in the same position had managed to carry on. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Monica Lewinsky. I even had sympathy for the woman who was fired back in 2013 after tweeting a horrible joke about how she was on her way to Africa and hoped she didn’t get AIDS.