“Good job, white supremacist.”
“I finally realised, ‘oh, this might not have been a scam after all’.”
But this isn’t the story of that abuse.
Instead, this is how Sachi Schmidt-Hori survived it and pushed back - with surprising results.
“I didn’t know any of the background, the back stories,” she says.
“They just asked me to conduct some research and I agreed to do it.”
Schmidt-Hori’s contributions began by completing what she describes as “small projects” researching various themes.
(“Nagato is not his name,” Schmidt-Hori admits.
After that, all hell broke loose.
I became a very easy target."
“I was just so surprised.
But now, looking back, I can kind of understand what happened.”
While Ubisoft reeled from Shadows' backlash, Schmidt-Hori had her own perspective.
“Which was interesting.
And because of my last name they assumed I was married to an Anglo-American,” Schmidt-Hori says.
“Well, he’s actually biracial.
“It’s something that only Asian men would really pick up on, and it’s very interesting.
So I decided I would just do the other way.”
“But with one person, we actually had a Zoom meeting for one hour.
“‘Why are you attacking me?'”
she asked the person.
“‘I’m trying to educate the general public about people like you.’
And then eventually he apologised and took down his post.”
“It’s white supremacist, nationalist ideology couched as being sympathetic.
“It’s very, very typical.
And it’s unfortunate that some Asian Americans also become sympathetic to white supremacy [through this].”
“The reasoning doesn’t matter, they’re unhappy and need to blame it on someone else.”
And here I was, this woke so-called academic who wrote this book.”
While Schmidt-Hori felt able to contact those sending her abuse, she was also not naive.
“He is a professional troll,” Schmidt-Hori acknowledges.
“He has a media company dedicated to anti-DEI activities.
I said, ‘no, no, I don’t want your fans to be there cheering for you.
This is just between you and me as two individuals.
And I just want you to realise what you did was so much more than you probably intended.
Imagine your wife receiving hundreds of death threats and her picture is all over the internet.
You’d be worried about her, right?
Well, that’s my husband.’
I was like, good job, white supremacist.”
But could Ubisoft have done more to protect Schmidt-Hori and others?
The professor has a mix of views.
That made me really, really upset.
“They never prepared me or warned me beforehand.
I was completely blindsided, and they knew that my profile was just out in the open.
But yeah, I think they could have easily imagined that I’d become a target.”
Ultimately, despite “death threats and threats of violence”, she surmised this was unlikely to happen.
“They would just ask me ‘do you think they’re actually going to do it?’
And I’d say, ‘maybe not’.
“Unfortunately, some members of our teams and close partners have faced online harassment.
