"Help! My Grandparents Are Giving Me a Huge Financial Gift."

If she calls them racists, can she still keep the money?

Original column: Dear Prudence, March 20 2024

My take: The LW is about to graduate from high school, and her grandparents—her father’s parents—just stunned her with the news that they’ve saved $200K for her college expenses.

Great, right? But there’s a wrinkle: They haven’t given anything to her older sister. The LW asked why not, and her grandparents said it’s because her sister isn’t their biological grandchild. The two girls share a mother, but the sister’s father walked out when the mother was pregnant. “Our dad,” writes the LW, adopted her sister, then aged two, when he married their mother.

The sister’s biological father was Black. The LW suspects that has something to do with the grandparents’ attitude. Advice Obsessed suspects she’s right.

The crowning touch is that the LW isn’t her parents’ biological child either! She was conceived by donor sperm, but the grandparents don’t know this.

The LW would feel “dishonest” taking the whole $200K for herself. But how should she proceed? She has two ideas. Should she take it, then transfer half to her sister? Or should she tell her grandparents she’s not actually their bio offspring, and risk losing all the money?

“Or what?” she asks, in a refreshing acknowledgement that these ideas may not cover the waterfront.

Prudie thinks the first idea—taking the money then splitting it with the sister—is “generous and brilliant.” Once “the money is secured in your respective accounts,” Prudie says the LW can either say nothing to the grandparents, or “tell everyone the truth about why you made that choice—and why you suspect your grandparents made theirs.” She writes: “you have the power to set your family on a new path when it comes to rejecting racism and embracing honesty and fairness.”

She also suggests the LW keep the sperm donor out of it, “since that’s your parents’ business as much as yours.”

Oh, well! At least Prudie got the last part right!

Is the LW’s plan to share the money really “generous and brilliant”? Sharing is such an obvious thing to do, and it would be so skanky not to share, that it really doesn’t warrant that kind of praise. We don’t want the LW developing a hero complex for simply doing the decent thing.

But sharing presupposes you’ve got it to give, and that’s where Prudie shockingly disappoints.

For the LW to take the money, then allocate it against her grandparents’ wishes, would be dishonorable. Lecturing them afterward about why she did so would add insult to injury, (especially as she’s merely speculating). Far from “set[ting her] family on a new path when it comes to rejecting racism and embracing honesty and fairness,” this approach would antagonize her grandparents, at a minimum. In the worst case, it would kick-start World War III.

How many people, when directly rebuked, say “Oh! you’re so wise! I see the error of my ways!” The LW might get a nice self-righteous buzz from this confrontation, sort of like what Prudie got from recommending it, but she will only have made things worse.

Advice columnists love confrontation! They’re constantly recommending it, confusing it, I think, with a kind of integrity. The problem—as Advice Obsessed is getting a little tired of saying—is that butting heads almost never changes anyone’s mind. I’ve said this again, and again, and again. You’ll be wrapped in the beautiful merit of your candor, but you’ll be standing in the ruins of what once was a relationship. Everyone will be unhappy; no one will have learned a thing.

Luckily, where conflict usually fails, setting a good example can be very effective. This only works, though, if those who set the example act with scrupulous honor. They must be beyond suspicion or reproach. And for the LW, this is not possible if she pockets half the cash. Here’s what the LW ought to say to her grandparents:

“Thanks for explaining about the biological connection. She’s fully my sister, though, and I can’t accept this gift unless the two of us are dividing it equally. But thanks for the offer, and I hope you’ll be able to find another use for the money.”

Prudie has really dropped the ball here. Not only does she want this girl to confront her grandparents, she advises her to do so only after “the money is secured” in her bank account!” Sleazy, Prudie! Just sleazy!

But what about college? That’ll be a disappointment, but presumably the LW had a plan for that before any of this happened, and she could revert to it after she gracefully declines the gift that comes with such unsavory strings. Before she even starts on college, she’s already learning a number of Big Life Lessons. One of these is that sometimes, taking the high road means you don’t get to keep the money.

Could this letter be fake? The spidey sense of an advice obsessive is telling me it might be. But as usual in these cases, it doesn’t matter, because the shock is in the response, not the letter from (if real) a very young person.