Claiming the ASCII ribbon campaign was racist is neither technically correct nor practically correct. There weren't any machines that supported ASCII directly

Claiming the ASCII ribbon campaign was racist is neither technically correct nor practically correct. There weren't any machines that supported ASCII directly that late in the game. Instead, everything supported DOS code pages. Those are supersets of ASCII, and those supported localization. This was often called "ASCII", since that's pronounced with fewer syllables. On top of that, by 1998, mainstream systems were starting to support UTF-8, and, as a superset of ASCII, it was treated like "just another" plain-text format / extended ASCII code page by software user interfaces of the time. Practically speaking, the campaign was against sending HTML (or, god forbid, RTF) emails. That doesn't preclude localization at all.