Of all the names I’ve been called in life, including the usual anti-Semitic slurs, none has more sting than “affirmative action hire.”

I got that a lot on social media after I joined The Times. The meaning was clear: I was a quota-filler who had taken the place of somebody more deserving. Whatever I had accomplished, through talent or hard work, wasn’t enough. I was just fulfilling a misbegotten mandate for ideological diversity — and doing even that poorly, since, like every other columnist here, I’m also a Trump opponent.

The accusation always came from the left, and it contained an implicit admission. The very people who ordinarily championed affirmative action as a cornerstone of a decent society — for giving a needed leg up to the systemically disadvantaged — had no trouble understanding the other dimension of the policy — an unfair preference for the unqualified. They knew that “affirmative action,” whatever its benefits as a form of social engineering, was a synonym for mediocrity.

They also knew the insult’s insidious psychological power to wound. To be told that you are an affirmative action hire shakes the ground under your feet. Am I being humored? Have I always been? Is coming to The Times a mark of professional merit, or is my job a polite fiction, one that everyone but me sees through?