Retire “Grandfather” from Your Corporate Speak

I got a call from a member of our team yesterday, alarmed that during a client meeting the phrase “grandfathered” or “grandfathered in” was used repeatedly by the clients. When it was clear to Tony that I wasn’t getting why it was an issue, he gave me a much-needed U.S. history lesson. 

And the lesson is in plain sight in the Merriam Webster dictionary:

Grandfather clause (noun)

A clause creating an exemption based on circumstances previously existing

Especially: a provision in several southern state constitutions designed to enfranchise poor whites and disenfranchise Blacks by waiving high voting requirements for descendants of men voting before 1867.

After the 15th amendment was ratified in 1870, some southern states decided to create their own amendments at a state level that would in part nullify the federal amendment in order to keep Blacks from being able to vote. Some of these amendments included poll taxes or literacy tests. Certainly, both white and Black voters were affected by a literacy rule. So, southern legislation added a “grandfather clause.” This is specifically how it worked: an illiterate man could vote as long as he or his lineal ancestor (i.e., grandfather) had been a registered voter before 1867 (before the 15th amendment was even ratified). This was Black voter suppression. It was also voter suppression along party lines, as during those times, most Blacks were Republicans (the party of Lincoln) and most Democrats were whites. 

While such state amendments and clauses were ruled unconstitutional in 1915, we all know that voter suppression continues to this day. 

The term “grandfathered” and phrase “grandfathered in” have been in use in corporate speak for as long as I can remember—and I’m sad to say that I have used these terms myself. 

 As Nancy Riley pointed out in her Medium article from May 2019, a substitute could be “legacy”, as in “we’ll legacy you in” (as Nancy notes, a bit of “verbification” is needed in this case). The only challenge with legacy is that in some cases, it refers to a specific platform at a company (a really old one!). But, in addition to legacy, there are some other alternatives, depending on the need. For example, if you’re offering an existing product to new clients who bring in a certain asset level, instead of saying you’ll also “grandfather” existing clients without requiring the asset level, you could say you’ll “carry-over” existing clients, or “loyalty” them in. 

We’re encouraging our team members and clients to no longer use the term “grandfather”, and to try different words to get to the true meaning of what it is they are trying to say. If any year was a year to put a hard stop continuing to use language with racist history and power, it is 2020.

To quote advisory board member and guest blogger, Paul Bates, “the bottom line is that we need to reflect on all idiomatic phraseology to ensure that it is still relevant and respectful today, and that it does not fall into a form of micro-aggression, however innocently we use it.”