U of A professor receives racist voicemail telling him “to go back to his country”

Trigger warning: Be advised that this article contains reporting on racist actions which some may find offensive. 

When a University of Alberta professor checked his office voicemail before bed, he was surprised to hear a racist voicemail telling him to go back to his country. 

Ubaka Ogbogu, a U of A health and science law professor and the only Black professor in the faculty of law, received a racist voicemail directed to his office phone on November 28 at 12:30 a.m. Because he now works from home, Ogbogu receives all his work voicemails as emailed recordings that send as soon as the phone call ends. This means when he checked his emails that night, he was listening to the message seconds after the phone call occurred. 

In between different combinations of foul language, the caller raises racist sentiment against Ogbogu, emphasizing that he doesn’t belong in Canada.

“C*ck sucker for a f*cking lawyer you are, you sure  are a heavy hitter. You and your twenty recorded…. You’re a fricking pr*ck dude, go back to your own country. Like honestly f*ck off man.”

“What do you have invested in our politics?  What, to get more of your own people here? Like F*cking go home, this is not your country. You’re a loser, f*ck off.”

When Ogbogu first heard the message, his initial reaction was concern about a fixated harasser. Earlier on November 26, he received an email from a burner account which echoed a similar message, telling him to go back to Nigeria and commenting on a CBC story Ogbogu provided expert commentary on. 

Hate emails aren’t an unusual occurrence in Ogbogu’s life. Being outspoken on social media, the professor is used to receiving hateful comments through email. However, aftering hearing this voice message, he couldn’t help but think back to this specific email. This combination of email and voicemail happening two days apart concerned Ogbogu that this was the same person. 

“I wasn’t as concerned about the email because I do tend to get hatemail from time to time,” he explained. “It was the fact that it seems to be the same person that’s concerning.” 

“I thought about the fact that it was two days apart. Someone may get angry with me today, send me an email, but if two days after they’re still angry enough to make a call — and the person sounded a bit unhinged, maybe inebriated and they made the call past midnight. That worried me a lot because it means that the person is started to fixate on me.”

Playing the racist voicemail for his wife, Ogbogu was a bit worried about the safety of his family, especially since the email he received mentioned his Nigerian ethnicity something that he doesn’t discuss publically often. This suggested to Ogbogu that the emailer had done research on him.

“I played it for my wife and she got really worried,” he said. “I actually had to abandon my own concerns because she was very worried and when she worries, I worry.”

In response to the belief that Ogbogu should “go back to his own country,” and the other racist comments brought up in the voicemail, he emphasized that it’s important not to try to rationalize or understand these kinds of xenophobic attacks.

“It comes from a place that is deeply irrational, so trying to make sense of it validates it as something that is coming from a rational place of reasoning, and I don’t think it is,” he explained. “The fact that I don’t belong here is a very easy racist trope…. I do think it is a very easy thing for a racist to go to because that kind of thinking is becoming increasingly normalized in our society.”

Ogbogu said the narrative of positioning racialized minorities as “the other” is woven into systemic racism, and our systems enable this narrative. 

“Many of us racialized minorities are treated as the other, so it’s easy to see our opinions as not part of the mainstream, as something that is not an expression of Canadianess or of being from Alberta,” he explained. “It is read as an expression of someone who is alien … It’s a notion that you don’t have full citizenship.”

“If we’re going to take the issue of xenophobia seriously, we need to think about how the system creates the expression that we are the other and how this makes us easy targets for attacks like this.”

Twitter’s possible role in the voicemail

Ogbogu shared the voicemail through a tweet at 1:11 a.m. and the tweet is now sitting at over 1,000 likes and over 400 retweets. According to Ogbogu, twitter may have actually played a role in the voicemail he received.

On Twitter, provincial health spokesperson Steve Buick posted tweets critical of Ogbogu’s expert commentary in the same CBC article that the email mentioned above commented on.

In the tweets, some of which have been deleted, Buick calls Ogbogu “the most frantically biased academic in Alberta,” and said that Ogbogu was making a mockery of the leaked recording between Hinshaw and the United Conservative Party (UCP) by calling the leak a “whistleblower.”

Ogbogu believes that Buick’s framing may have led to an unfair interpretation of his commentary.

“My sense is that [issue managers] frame my expert commentary and the expert commentary of other academics in a way that makes us targets for harassment,” he explained. “They don’t engage with the substance of our arguments. Instead they use dog whistles.”

“For example, he kept referring to the fact that I said when children go back to school it will be a pox-party. That’s not what I said. I said if schools open unsafely, they will turn to pox-parties… when he I said pox-parties, he’s trying to get parents to be angry at me for not supporting school reopening, seeing as their livelihoods may depend on their children having a place to go… by leaving out the fact that I said unsafe re-opening, he’s blowing a dog whistle here and that is something that can get people to turn against me.”

Ogbogu maintained that he believes that these kinds of actions from provincial spokespeople creates the idea that he and other critics are unfairly criticizing the provincial government. 

“It is my opinion that his actions and the actions of all the other issues managers create an impression that those of us who are responding to the government’s policies are doing so with intent of being unfair to the elected government of Alberta, and that is the kind of thing that would get people angry.”

Buick did not respond to a request for a comment. 

Ogbogu chose to return to twitter with the voicemail for two reasons: to share the vulnerabilities of being a vocal racialized academic and to provide evidence against the theory that Canada is a place where racist attacks don’t occur.

“It’s in the public interest to know that an academic who is Black, challenged the government and then got racial slurs hurled at them through their work phone and email. I don’t think it’s a private matter… because I am, in many ways, a public servant. I do a job that is public facing.”

“We hear all the time about how Canada is different from the United States — it’s not a country where these kinds of things happen…. If someone like me, who is quite privileged, can face this, imagine what someone who is way less privileged is subject to.”

The 224 responses to the tweet are largely sending Ogbogu messages of support. Alongside twitter and an email inbox filled with emails from the community, Ogbogu has also received lots of support from the U of A community. President Bill Flanagan, the faculty of law, and the faculty of pharmacy, the Black Graduate Students Association and the Association of Academic Staff have all put out statements condemning the racist act against Ogbogu and supporting academic freedom.

“I’m happy the university is taking this seriously,” he said. “I think the university needs to take a stand on this and make it very clear to anyone who is listening that academics are doing what we have to do and what we have the freedom to do. We shouldn’t be exposed to personal attacks.”

Racist voicemail highlights need for more Black professors

In response to the attack, Ogbogu took his university directory page down. However, when a past colleague emphasized the importance of being a visible Black faculty member for Black students in the community, he decided to put his page back up, although void of any contact info.

For Ogbogu, who is the only Black professor in the faculty of law, the need to keep his page up despite the voicemail, speaks to the need for more Black faculty members at the university. Ogbogu believes hiring more Black faculty will also allow Black professors to be more vocal on issues that disproportionately affect their community, such as the COVID-19 pandemic response. 

“Because there are so few black professors at the university, we have to toe the line and engage in safe topics, which will inevitably be topics that don’t matter to our community,” he said. “Or, you run the risk of exposing yourself to criticism… if you think about a pandemic response, who is being affected by a lack of a response? It’s vulnerable people… Indigenous, Black, brown people… I can’t afford to treat it as something I talk about today and then let it go — I have to keep at it.”

Though this incident may have the Black community at the U of A worried, Ogbogu wants to remind them that blatant racist attacks like the voicemail are becoming less common and instead urges them to focus on the “invisible ways” racism is reproduced within institutions.

“It’s important to not treat things like this as evidence of the system being against you,” he said. “The system may be against you, but this is not the most common manifestation of how the system works against racialized people… Stand-tall, you’re bigger than racist words.”

However, when Black scholars and students experience similar incidents of racism, Ogbogu offers a piece of advice that helped him get through this incident: let it out.

“I grew up filing away difficult things that happened to me — I’m a suppressor and I suppress things so deep,” he said. “The one thing I have learned as soon as I became an independent adult is that you gotta let some of these things go and the best way to let it go is to let it out there. If you keep it to yourself, it lives in your head and becomes worse than it is… you start to extrapolate that it’s all of Canada that hates me.”

“But if you put it out there, people can react to it and this helps deal with it… it shows you the other side of the country — the better side.”