I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on HN, nor am I going to resort to "Hell in the US you can probably sue for anything - but you're not going to win", much as I am tempted.<p>The legal definition of libel is a <i>false</i> statement published with the <i>intent</i> to defame a living person.<p>Now, affirmative action is not a statement, true or false, about a living person. If you are hired somewhere because of affirmative action legislation, this does not equate to Congress or your employer saying "you are a moron, have a cookie". Whether you agree with it or not, the purpose of affirmative legislation is to statistically address socially-derived shortcomings in the performance of a minority by temporarily stacking the deck in their favour. This is commonly misunderstood by some people, who think the purpose of affirmative action is to benefit a particular individual.<p>So for example, causing a person from a racial minority to be admitted to college by enacting racial admission quotas is not intended to help that particular person; it is because the largest determinant factor in whether somebody will gain college admission is a college educated parent. So in this case, you are stacking the decks for a group of people now so that you won't have a disparity in the next generation.  In other words, even if you have benefited from affirmative action, it was not done for your personal sake. It was done for reasons of social engineering.<p>It's a complicated issue, and I doubt HN is the place for it.